the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Under cover of the pandemic, Greece’s right-wing government has passed a slew of new measures to benefit the wealthy at the expense of workers, while massively expanding police powers. On the back of a decade of austerity, the latest laws are set to transform the country into a client state and playground for foreign tourists.   by Matthaios Tsimitakis/Mihalis Panayiotakis    Part 6 - A Government Mired in Corruption and Scandals As society is kept on edge, a flurry of scandals is only adding to the sense of discontent, of which we state but a few:     Imprisoned refugees are dying from preventable causes while others commit suicide in hellish camps that lack the basics for a bare minimum of decency. Others are being illegally pushed back in the middle of the Aegean in what looks to be now standard procedure for the Greek coast guard, according to humanitarian NGOs.     Mitsotakis’s hand-picked director of the National Theatre, Dimitris Ligna...

People are dying at record rates from opioid overdoses, and harm reduction advocates are asking the Biden administration to overhaul how it deals with the crisis.   by Michelle ChenTwitt  Part 3 - Settlements On top of federal and state funding for opioid treatment and overdose prevention, state lawmakers are anticipating an injection of funds from settlements in lawsuits filed against top pharmaceutical companies and distributors. Dozens of state attorneys general targeted these companies, including Purdue, AmerisourceBergen and Johnson and Johnson, for aggressively and recklessly marketing prescription opioids into communities.  But advocates are concerned that states might divert settlement funds away from their intended purposes, such as compensating the families of overdose victims or funding treatment and prevention. (They point to the state funds yielded from the tobacco industry settlements of the late 1990s, of which only a small percentage was invested in anti-s...

Belarusian regime-change activist Roman Protasevich, whose arrest on a grounded plane caused a global scandal, joined Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and was cultivated by the US government’s media apparatus.   by Ben Norton  Part 3 - US government-funded Belarusian infowarrior fights alongside Ukrainian neo-Nazis Roman Protasevich is one of the main Belarusian infowarriors whose career has been cultivated by the US government. Following his arrest, Franak Viačorka, a top Tsikhanouskaya advisor who has also long been funded by Washington and its soft-power arms, tweeted that he and Protasevich had worked as “Havel fellows” at the US government’s propaganda arm Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). RFE/RL, which was originally called Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, was founded by the CIA to function as an information warfare weapon against the former Soviet Union, and continues playing the same role against the Russian Federation today. Besides his stint at Washington’s...

The fact that the very department that trains high state officials and agents of secretive three letter agencies is also the place that produces many of the journalists we rely on to stand up to those officials and keep them in check is seriously problematic.   by Alan Macleod   Part 1 - National security school In a previous investigation, MintPress News explored how one university department, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, functions as a school for spooks. Its teaching posts are filled with current or former NATO officials, army officers and intelligence operatives to churn out the next generation of spies and intelligence officers.    However, we can now reveal an even more troubling product the department produces: journalists. An inordinate number of the world’s most influential reporters, producers and presenters, representing many of the most well-known and respected outlets — including The New York Times , CNN and the BBC — lear...

Glenn Greenwald   On this episode of System Update , Glenn Greenwald speaks with Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of the famous or infamous subreddit r/WallStreetBets. As AMC's stock price explodes the way GameStop's did earlier this year, endangering several institutional short-sellers, the discussion explores the politics, purpose, ethos and future of a rapidly growing group of small online investors and activists who are masterfully gaming the financial casino in a way long reserved for Wall Street titans.   Related: WallStreetBets Redditors brilliantly demonstrate a way to demolish Wall Street fraudulent Ponzi scheme

With 95.96 percent of the precincts counted, Peru's presidential candidate, Pedro Castillo, is ahead of her opponent for Fuerza Popular, Keiko Fujimori, on Monday, after the candidate reversed the preliminary results. Peru's National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) presented the updated data on a web portal so that the population could follow the vote count.   Based on this data, the candidate for Peru Libre, Castillo, has obtained 8,548,929 valid votes, equivalent to 50.27 percent of valid votes. On the other hand, Fujimori has 8,457,547 valid votes, representing 49.73 percent of the processed ballots. Meanwhile, in a public statement to her followers, Fujimori began to accuse Castillo of vote manipulation, realizing that her chances of victory grow ever slimmer.  Full report: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Peru-Elections-Castillo-Widens-His-Lead-as-Final-Results-Near-20210607-0023.html

failed evolution   World's number one political prisoner, Julian Assange, still in high security prison for exposing horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.     

Since the pandemic began, America’s billionaires have seen their wealth skyrocket to an amount almost equal to a fifth of US GDP. This concentration of wealth is morally unacceptable — but it also represents a mortal threat to democracy.  by Luke Savage  It’s by now widely understood that the past twelve months have been a tale of two very different pandemics. Amid the countless stories of human misery buried in monthly unemployment figures, reports of widespread hunger, and tragic (though avoidable) deaths of frontline workers, COVID-19 has been a veritable bonanza for the tiny few at the commanding heights of the hyper-financialized global economy. Recent numbers published by the Financial Times underscore just how dramatic these gains have really been:                               Over the past two decades, as the global populati...

Newly leaked documents show that US officials in 1958 cavalierly planned a nuclear strike on China over a handful of disputed islands. As Washington once more stokes tensions with China, it’s a reminder of the callous recklessness at the heart of US foreign policy.   by Branko Marcetic  Part 2 - Destruction for Dignity The plan, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and developed before the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis began, envisaged only two phases in the response to a Chinese attack: patrol and reconnaissance, followed by the defeat of Chinese forces, who would be “ countered by an American attack with atomic weapons against the Chinese mainland. ” The nuclear attacks would begin against Chinese air bases before moving incrementally up into the Chinese mainland as far north as Shanghai, as was discussed at one point. As the study took care to point out, the plan didn’t include any intermediate step involving conventional weapons: “ the phase immediately following patrol and r...

Through his hallowed foundation, the world’s de facto public health czar has been a stalwart defender of monopoly medicine.  by Alexander Zaitchik Part 5 - Gates defused the real issue of decolonizing global health By 1999, Bill Gates was in his final year as CEO of Microsoft, focused on defending the company he founded from antitrust suits on two continents. As his business reputation suffered high-profile beatings from U.S. and European regulators, he was in the process of moving on to his second act: the formation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which commenced his unlikely rise to the commanding apex of global public health policy. His debut in that role occurred during the contentious fifty-second General Health Assembly in May 1999.  It was the height of the battle to bring generic AIDS drugs to the developing world. The central front was South Africa, where the HIV rate at the time was estimated as high as 22 percent and threatened to decimate an entire gene...