by Dissident Voice Communications / April 4th, 2026
My day began, as usual, by checking out the Dissident Voice website. But lo and behold, the website was suspended. Egads!
After checking with the hosting site for DV, I was about to be hit by a double whammy.
DV was entrapped by two catch-22s. The hosting service required payment for hosting. I had not been informed because the email requesting payment was sent to the previous editor Angie who had passed away on 2 January 2025. The payment was not a problem, as DV had accumulated a enough money from donations to pay server costs and hire the occasional tech person …
A fragile ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. is unfolding amid deep mistrust, conflicting demands, and ongoing regional violence. Mediation efforts, particularly through Pakistan, have exposed miscommunication and political manipulation on multiple sides. While negotiations begin, both camps appear to be using the pause to regroup militarily. Iran is seen as holding strategic leverage, especially around the Strait of Hormuz, while global powers like China and Russia play complex behind-the-scenes roles. Despite talks, a lasting agreement seems unlikely, with tensions, competing interests, and the risk of escalation still dominating the landscape.
by Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares / April 10th, 2026
To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognized borders of June 4, 1967.
A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-US war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon. The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.
Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this …
The 13th and 14th centuries Mongol invasions and conquests were some of the most ferocious and deadliest incursions on humankind before the modern world wars. In its assault on Baghdad, the Mongol forces arrowed messages that guaranteed safety to those who had not fought the Mongols or surrendered to them. Resist and face execution. The Israeli military, purposely misnamed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and self-proclaimed as “the world’s most moral army,” out does the Mongol ferocity —surrender and leave or die. After persuading the terrified inhabitants to leave, Israel’s military forces proceed forward by bombing and dynamiting everything in …
In many ways it is. Blind dogmatic repetition of false, outdated, and capital-centered ideas and views has long been the norm for charter school proponents. Retrogressive ideas took hold long ago.
But reality also vanished long ago for most politicians, the media, the rich, corporate “leaders,” and higher education “leaders.”
Disinformation, lies, bromides, propaganda, and gaslighting, all turbocharged by Artificial Intelligence, have become the norm today. Every time someone hears, sees, or reads something these days they have to ask if it is fake or real.
Naturally, human cognition and relations have taken …
He’s out of ideas, a mind running on empty. Increasingly, he is also short of reason, zapped by geopolitical addling and meddling. Now that US President Donald J. Trump has reached an uneasy understanding with Tehran that a two-week ceasefire should apply to the warring parties (Israel, as usual, has its own elastic interpretation as it continues attacking Lebanon), it is worth considering the warring language he has been using since February 28. Of note is the shrill wording of various ultimata he has directed at Iran.
On April 7, the President seemed to flirt with the notion of …
The ceasefire plan with Iran, if it holds, will get things (somewhat) back to the way they were before Donald Trump took a chainsaw to the world order. (Except of course all the people who were murdered will not come back.) If you hadn’t noticed, this is a theme for Trump.
1. He does something utterly unhinged, insane, chaotic and stupid. 2. He tries to get something he wants — like control of Iran, control of Greenland, or a subservient trade deal from China. 3. He …
by Peter Blunt and Peiman Salehi / April 8th, 2026
Any regimes that need changing, including the U.S., Israel and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission.
As The Fat Boy Posse’s latest illegal, depraved, unprovoked, and predictable attack on Iran proceeds with the customary savagery and disregard for civilian life and infrastructure, we have been trying to put ourselves in the position of one of those Muslim Iranians said by the Western media to have been protesting in their …
After the Fossil Age, Future Civilizations Stand on a Thinner Floor
There’s a comforting story that circulates in collapse circles: even if this version of industrial civilization is doomed, the planet will eventually reset. The fossil binge will end, forests will return, the climate will cool, and in a few centuries or millennia new Romes and Han Chinas will rise on a refreshed Earth, running on biomass and clever agriculture instead of oil and gas.
It’s an attractive story, not least because it reframes our crisis as a …
The problem with demagogues is that they invariably fall into infantile practices. The politics of the playground is the politics of hate, violence and betrayal. It’s the politics of finding the useful enemy and bullying the theme till it’s raw. In Hungary’s parliamentary elections set for April 12, the only theme that seems to matter to the ruling Fidesz-Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) alliance and Viktor Orbán, the country’s demagogic leader of 16 years, is Ukraine.
Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky have been pictured as symbolic occupiers, intruders and meddlers, intent on bringing in Hungary and the rest of …
The 2026 elections in Bangladesh have ignited considerable debate. While segments of the middle and upper-middle classes lauded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) symbolic triumph over Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI), the election was markedly more complex than a routine political event. It has raised profound questions concerning the evolving political landscape, referred to as a ‘new settlement’, within Bangladesh.
The election underscored a second phase in the nation’s political development: it effectively served as a referendum on proposed constitutional reforms that have the capacity to modify Bangladesh’s fundamental identity and its secular character by revising the principles established after the 1971 Liberation …
When deranged leaders invoke divine catastrophe as a political instrument, it is not only their enemies who are consumed. Unless they are stopped, we will all be victims of these two psychopaths.
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Even though they make up only 8% of schools in the country, crimes, scandals, and arrests take place at a robust tempo in the nation’s privately-operated charter schools.
These non-stop wrongdoings usually include fraud, embezzlement, harassment, and a range of sex crimes.
This is not surprising given the weak accountability, transparency, and background checks that have plagued the crisis-prone charter school sector for more than 30 years.
A small sample of headlines from just this year speaks volumes:
JD Vance on UFOs: “I don’t think they’re aliens; I think they’re demons.”
Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
We don’t see the world (or the phenomenon) as it is — we see it as we are. High time the exorcists known as clinical mental health workers were dispatched to Vance’s DC residence.
The Vice President, as do an evangelical cadre of top US Air Force brass, warn, UFOs are piloted by inter-dimensional things that go bump in the night. By the evidence, the primary threat to the security of the US homeland: …
It was celebrated with ghoulish delight. On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed the Penal Bill (Amendment – Death Penalty for Terrorists), an instrument expanding the use of the death penalty for offences of a terrorist nature. The death penalty had previously existed in Israeli law for war crimes but was abolished in 1954 for ordinary crimes in peacetime. Technically, it remained on the books for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and certain cases of martial law.
The law’s purpose is articulated as establishing the death sentence “for the sake of the struggle …
Since Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, the US has attacked the Bolivarian Revolution in multiple ways, includingthroughpropaganda that categorize it as “authoritarian,” “unfree,” and “undemocratic.” This US propaganda assault is intended to dictate what should be done in Venezuela, including a return to “democracy,” with “free” and “fair” elections. Emboldened by the US military attack on Jan. 3, and relying on the US propaganda assault, the Venezuelan opposition has launched an aggressive move to seize control of the state by seeking concessions from …
“Tel Aviv, stripped of illusion, as you have never witnessed it,” read the caption above a viral March 2026 video showing missiles hammering the Israeli city as explosions burst across the night sky. To the casual scroller, it appeared to be a harrowing document of modern conflict. The problem, however, was that the video was a deepfake.
Deepfakes are synthetic media edited or generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to the New York Times, a “cascade of A.I. fakes about war with Iran” have proliferated across social media since the United States (U.S.) and Israel reignited military actions with Iran on …
Every answer carries the next problem inside it, the way a season carries the one that will replace it. We have learned not to be surprised by this.
We were born here, and so we stay. What else is there? The world ends at the television frame, where the evening news flickers and dies each night and we sit in its light a little longer than we need to. Beyond that edge is something we have no name for.
This place made us and we made something of it. We got up before light and we worked and we felt that the …
Almost one year after the 2024 election on a peace platform, the Trump Administration backed itself into an alarming militaristic US-Israeli tag team that is not what the American public voted for. Almost immediately, the newly elected Peace President who continued to lust for the Noble Peace Prize, allowed his country to be drawn into a series of unconstitutional conflicts with the most recent being a severe unprovoked war of aggression against Iran.
Early in Trump’s second term his no-new interventionist war pledge was no longer public policy when he failed to end the war in Ukraine as promised, followed by initiation of …
A friendly quarrel while we agree that the US sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction and kill more people than wars do. And that we must talk much more about sanctions than we have so far.
by Jan Oberg / March 19th, 2026
Image: The News Statesman
John Mearsheimer recently stated that U.S. sanctions murdered around 38 million people between 1971 and 2021 – see the video below. It is a dramatic figure, and it has spread quickly because it captures, in one sentence, the enormous human cost of modern sanctions.
I share his concern about the destructive effects of economic coercion. But the specific number he cites — and the way he attributes it — deserves a friendly academic clarification.
The figure comes from a 2023 Lancet Global Health article estimating the mortality effects of unilateral U.S. …
President Hassan receives a report from the presidential commissions at an official handover ceremony, March 2026.
Two presidential commissions have recommended the mass eviction of Maasai people from some of East Africa’s most iconic conservation areas and tourist destinations.
The commissions were established by Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan following previous evictions of Maasai pastoralists from parts of the world-famous Serengeti ecosystem, and large-scale protests in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in 2024.
Now, despite a global outcry at the earlier evictions, the two Commissions have:
Last week, we watched a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile murder more than 160+ Iranian school children. We watched in horror, helpless to stop the incoming massacres as the U.S. and Israel carpet-bombed Iran, then Lebanon, displacing millions of people from their homes. The pure, unrelenting terror continues to unfold. We are shocked and devastated, but we are also enraged — because for every bomb the U.S. and Israel drop, a bunch of men in cushy offices profit off all the death.
There is an urgent need to identify and address the burgeoning war profiteers that are leading the world headfirst …
The penny has clearly dropped. Trump and his domesticated colony of phocine honkers and clappers have been forced to admit what the Iranians (and presumably Western intelligence agencies) have known for some time: that Iran has a pretty much immovable stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz, which has now clearly been shown to be the Achilles Heel of the US-Israeli position in the Middle East and, to some extent, of the global economy.
For reasons set out later in this essay, the CIA will have known that there was very little that the US and Israel could do if Iran chose …
Next month, on April 12, 2026, Hungary will hold parliamentary elections that will have a great impact not only on the country’s future domestic policy but also on the coordination of its actions and decisions with EU countries in foreign policy. The main struggle will take place between the Fidesz Party, that in now in power, and the opposition party Tisza.
The Fidesz headed by incumbent Prime Minister Victor Orban has been in power for more than 15 years now, and for this whole period of time it has conducted the policy that often contradicts to the political course of the …
by Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores / March 18th, 2026
I’m traveling to Cuba for the first time on March 21 to be in Havana with the Nuestra América Convoy, in which people from dozens of countries representing a variety of organizations will break the blockade, bringing much-needed supplies to the island. CODEPINK is bringing 6,300 pounds of medical equipment and medicine with help from Global Health Partners and others. These supplies will be given to clinics, hospitals, and maternity centers as Cuba deals with the latest horrifying crime against humanity perpetrated by the United States.
The chaotic Trump reign over US politics is showing critical signs of weakening on many fronts: Trumponomics is failing: Trumpian immigration policy has stirred a powerful backlash; Teflon Trump has been tarnished by his clumsy, slippery handling of the Epstein scandal; his foreign-policy contradictions and outrages have confused both international friends and foes alike; and his violation of his “end to endless wars” campaign has caused a break with some of his most ardent supporters.
It is easy to forget that this Trump regime has been in power for only a little more than a year, while enjoying a majority …
Re-creation of an American foreign policy tactic, “We have to kill them in order to save them,” sheds a dark light on the executive leadership that guides foreign policies and on the political commentators who inform Americans of the policies. The U.S. government released its assessment of why Iran must be pulverized into the Stone Age, and favored political reporters persuaded their readers to agree with the policy.
The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens, The White House, March 2, 2026
For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — has killed …
Since 1962 the US imposed an economic blockade on Cuba designed “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Until 1990 this brutality was greatly alleviated by the solidarity of the socialist countries which provided the Cuban people with essential trade and aid. That provided some protection, but as 638 Ways to Kill Castro illustrates, the US had other tools, including many acts of terrorism and biological warfare.
Despite decades of resistance to the blockade by solidarity organizations in the US, despite polls consistently showing most people being against the blockade, despite the United Nations General Assembly votes for the …
Facit indignatio versum
(Indignation makes my verses) – Juvenal
In his analyses of the causes of the first world war, Lenin stressed the importance of understanding the policies the belligerent states pursued before the war. Borrowing from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the Bolshevik leader argued that war is politics by other (namely, violent) means. Clausewitz put it this way: “War is policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of …
