Civil & Political Rights

Articles

Day of Two Suns

The Day of Two Suns: 70 years ago, the Pentagon conducted its biggest-ever atmospheric H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific. The 15-megaton Bravo shot spewed radioactive fallout on thousands of Marshallese, and long-lived radioisotopes all around the planet. Nearby Rongelap Atoll suffered the worst. Seventy years later, the people of Rongelap and Bikini have yet to go home.



Microbe Magic

We’ve all heard it before: Eat less meat. People lucky enough to eat, should eat less of everything. Microbe magic! Having fun with microbes. Growing them! And, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Israel’s eternal, undivided capital. For Jewish Israelis, not for indigenous Palestinians.


Genocide in Gaza

South Africa versus Israel at the International Court of Justice. Lawyers for South Africa depose. And, weaponizing genocide justice. Western powers accuse official enemies of committing it, while defending their dearest friend and ally. A conversation with Canadian genocide scholar William Schabas.


Algorithmic Warfare

Artificial Intelligence — to translate voices or access your bank account; to select targets to bomb and a few people to kill, along with thousands of others you weren’t targeting. The GPM speaks with the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare Project. Wherever you are in occupied Palestine, Israeli soldiers target everyone and everything, children’s theaters included. Last July, the GPM spoke with Mustafa Sheta, founding director and General Manager of the Jenin Freedom Theater. Today, he sits in an Israeli jail, one of 8000 Palestinian political prisoners.


A Cup Half Full or Half Empty?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on its 75th anniversary. If Britain and France had had their way, it would not have been universal. The GPM speaks with Canadian social scientist and human rights scholar Rhoda Howard-Hassmann. Lots of countries deny basic human rights laid down in the Declaration. Israel, for instance, in the occupied Palestinian Territories. A conversation with the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.


Gaza’s Children – A Single Cloth

The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), its leaders and armed militants are alien to Gaza and its people. They’ve parachuted in from some other place and are hiding out in the Gaza population — criminally and cynically — using ordinary, innocent Gazans as human shields. Such is the wisdom of the highest authorities. Ilan Pappe sees things differently. “They’re an organic part of the population,” the Israeli-British historian told the GPM. In his groundbreaking 2006 work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe described the origin of Gaza’s people, driven from their lands in the 1948 Nakba. Listen to our conversation.



Punishing the Amalekites

The dreadful events of October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum. As Israel retaliates, reducing little Gaza to rubble, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers and settlers work hand in hand, driving Palestinians from their land. Gazing on Israeli super-violence, genocide comes to mind.


Everybody Crying Mercy

Terrorist atrocities in Israel, Israeli atrocities in return. Seeds sown, reaped, then sown again. Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, the US vs. Russia and China … What sense to be made?


Mayhem in Palestine-Israel

The GPM speaks with Michael Lynk about the unfolding situation in Gaza and Israel. Lynk is Associate Professor of law at Western University, in London, Ontario, specializing in labour, human rights, disability, constitutional and administrative law. Between 2016 and 2022, Lynk served as ‘UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967’.


Henrietta Lacks’ Immortal Cells

One of medical science’s greatest paradoxes: The cancer cells that killed Henrietta Lacks revolutionized medicine — medical care her own family couldn’t afford. Narrow profit margins for Canadian uranium companies operating in Niger. Big health risks for Nigerien miners.


Gut Microbes & Hospital Wine

Feed your head, Grace Slick cried in the song ‘White Rabbit’. How about feeding the bacteria in your gut? Beer won’t make you smart, or healthy. How about wine, casked, matured and sold at your local hospital? And, recalling the Birmingham Campaign for civil rights, and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, sixty years ago.


Birmingham Sunday Remembered

In the annals of racist terrorism, few acts were more cowardly than the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Sixty years ago — on Sunday, September 15, 1963 — nineteen sticks of dynamite blew out a hole two-meters wide in the eighty year-old church’s back wall, and a half meter-deep hole in its basement. Four young girls were killed. The GPM spoke with Paul Kix, author of the book You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live – Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America.



The First 9-11

A year after the US Supreme Court banished abortion rights, millions of American women and girls face dire health and emotional health threats. Twenty two years after the Twin Towers’ destruction, we recall the first 9-11 — back in 1973. And, Palestine Panopticon. Israel’s vast carceral system for subjugated Palestinians.


Wanted Man

Kids aren’t the only ones rebelling against extinction. In Ottawa, a sixty-year-old gets arrested for sitting down on a highway. Forget politicians — citizens’ assemblies are the way to go. And, channeling Johnny Cash for adoring fans in France and Germany.



Palestinian Journalists Under Fire

Basel Adra is a 27-year-old Palestinian journalist from the village of Mufagara, in the Masafer Yatta region of the southern Palestinian West Bank. Basel is an accredited journalist with the Israeli publication +972. On July 15, while covering a Jewish settler attack on his village, Basel was detained by Israeli military forces. After several hours of abuse — bound and blindfolded under a hot sun — Basel was released.


Green Planet Monitor Podcast

Artificial Intelligence: existential threat to humanity, or just to basic civil rights? Personal DNA testing – you never know what you’ll find. And, Forever Chemicals in the blood of pregnant mums and their babies.