Could it be that Israel’s 30-year narrative about Iran – one that persuaded US President Donald Trump to wage a criminal and disastrous war of aggression – was always a fiction, an invention cooked up in Tel Aviv? Far from Tehran posing an existential danger to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for […]

For those unfamiliar with the intricate machinery of Israeli politics, the unanimous 110-0 vote to dissolve the Knesset on May 20 appears to be an earth-shattering event. On the surface, it looks as if the days of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition of far-right extremists are numbered. The reality, however, is far more […]

Saturday is the 140th anniversary of Randolph Bourne’s birthday. Antiwar.com named its parent institute for this early 20th century antiwar activist. Read Jeff Riggenbach’s biography of Bourne. [Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Randolph Bourne (1886–1918)”] Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of […]

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and […]

Trump administration cuts to grants disbursed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) likely resulted in a delayed response to the current Ebola outbreak in parts of central Africa, former federal health officials have said.

As of Monday, at least 220 people are suspected to have died from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. More than 500 cases of Ebola have been detected in Congo alone.

Though the virus was officially uncovered just last week, it’s believed that it had been spreading undetected for at least several weeks prior.

The Trump White House dismantled USAID last year, with the State Department absorbing its remaining necessary programs. The cuts affected billions of dollars in grant money for thousands of programs and nonprofit organizations around the world.

If left intact, some of that funding could have resulted in faster detection times for the current outbreak, former federal officials within USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told NBC News,

“What we’ve lost is speed, which is the most important thing in an outbreak like this,” said Nicholas Enrich, former acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID.

People who were once employed in programs funded by the U.S. have had to find new jobs, former CDC medical officer Daniel Bausch pointed out.

“Now they’re driving a taxi in Kinshasa or selling fruit somewhere. So this cadre of reasonably trained people that you can employ just isn’t around,” Bausch explained.

Heather Reoch Kerr, country director for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in the DRC, also said the lack of funding is disrupting the response to the Ebola outbreak.

“Many facilities in affected areas are operating without basic protective supplies” because of cuts to USAID, Reoch Kerr said.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently addressed the outbreak, saying that health officials within the organization are prepared to tackle the situation head-on. However, “we are facing an extremely serious and difficult outbreak,” Tedros added. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

The cuts to USAID, as well as the Trump administration’s decision to exit WHO (a choice that was finalized earlier this year), will undoubtedly disrupt global health responses, like what’s being seen in central Africa right now, health experts predicted.

The cuts have “disrupted the ability for contact tracing to happen, for those preventive activities to be mounted very well,” Abraham Leno, director of government relations for the humanitarian organization Alight, told The Hill.

Other experts predicted this outcome several months ago.

“Because of these two decisions and the long-lasting consequences, lives will be lost,” said Lindsey Locks, an assistant professor of Global Health at Boston University, in an op-ed last year.

Beyond disease outbreaks, the Trump administration’s decisions will “reverse decades of progress in reducing malnutrition and hunger worldwide,” Locks said.

The administration’s moves to dismantle international health infrastructure will “weaken the shared governance architecture for outbreak preparedness and response,” Chatham House fellow Ebere Okereke wrote in January.

“The WHO’s authority has been diminished,” Okereke added, noting, “Disease surveillance depends on trust.”

Reprinted from Andy Worthington’s website. 962 days since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, and 227 days since a ceasefire took effect through the implementation of the first phase of Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian former UN official who is now the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, has […]

When Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that any agreement with Iran must be “great and meaningful,” or there would be no agreement at all, he appeared to be drawing a wall between himself and Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. He wanted to make clear that even if negotiations were underway, they would be Trumpian negotiations: […]

The pattern of media reports – based on White House leaks – that an agreement with Iran is almost completed has become predictable. Where once the markets fluctuated wildly (and some insiders made huge profits with the information), each time we hear that the deal is almost complete only to see it fall through, the […]

US President Donald Trum’’s state visit to China will go down in history as the day the United States finally acknowledged Beijing’s ascendancy as a global superpower. That acknowledgment does not need to be articulated in a formal statement; it can be clearly read in the subtext of diplomatic behavior, global perception, and shifting media […]

Originally published on TomDispatch. Sometimes, Donald Trump just doesn’t get the credit he deserves. In so many ways, he is indeed a record-setting president. Here’s just one example, as reported by Dave DeCamp of Antiwar.com. In early May, the U.S. military bombed Somalia for the 63rd time this year, putting it on course to break […]

The other day, I was reading an old Atlantic Monthly and came across the following cartoon: That is one powerful image. I like the tiny heads on the pallbearers. They make me think of the posturing politicians who tell us to “support our troops” while sending them to die in illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional wars. […]