Articles

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Statistics lie. Some lie more than others. The ones regarding unemployment lie brazenly and have done so for years, erasing the very existence of the long-term unemployed by simply deleting them from the regular tally. Statistics about homelessness lie. But they have an excuse: the homeless are hard to keep track of. So we’re told that roughly half a million Americans have no home. But that statistic is belied by one from the National Center on Family Homelessness, which says 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in America. Add those two numbers together and you get three million homeless Americans. But even that statistic probably undercounts the number of people sleeping in tents, cars, subways, cheap hotels, on fri...

BY EVE OTTENBERG Photograph Source: 7C0 – CC BY 2.0 Two astounding events occurred in March – a peace pact between longtime, ferocious enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the presentation to Moscow of a peace deal for the Ukraine war. Both initiatives landed on a very startled west from China. The Middle East deal was presented to the world as a fait accompli, and it led, immediately, to arrangements for a ceasefire in Yemen, a country crucified in the proxy war between its two bigger neighbors and with lethal help from the United States. Now at last there is a real chance not only to end the butchery in Yemen, but also the larger genocide caused by starvation. Finally, food should be able to reach Yemen’s ports and thence the nation’s interior. The various UN agencies and t...

BY PAUL STREET A downtown Louisville bank slaughter 11 days ago was the 150th mass shooting (an incident in which 4 people other than the gun-wielder were shot) in the United States (US) in 2023. There have been 19 such shootings since then (as of 4 pm Central time on Thursday, April 20), including one that killed 4 people and injured 34 last Saturday, a day that saw 7 mass shootings. That’s 169 mass shootings in 111 days this year, including a school shooting that killed 7 people, including 3 children in Nashville, Tennessee three weeks ago. Mass shootings are no super big deal in the US anymore. They’ve been normalized, like high gas prices. They’re just part of US life now, an almost routine part of our “condition,” like climate change. I half expect to learn about a new m...

BY ANDRES D. MEDELLIN Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0 When it comes to mass shootings in the United States (like the one that just took place in Nashville), the figures are unequivocal. “Active shooter” cases have become more common in recent years. The percentage of mass shooters using semi-automatic rifles in those incidents has risen since 2009, with those armed with such rifles killing more people on average than those with handguns. One particular weapon, the AR-15-style rifle, stands outin recent incidents. Some estimates put the number of AR-15-style rifles owned by civilians in the U.S. somewhere between 5 and 20 million. This may represent a small share of the roughly 400 million firearms privately owned in t...

BY STEPHEN F. EISENMAN Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus (detail), 1601, Santa Maria Del Popolo, Rome. The Right to Change The fundamental right to change is under assault by a generation of American fascists acting under cover of a mainstream political party: the Republican Party. The danger grows daily and threatens civil rights, women’s rights, and personal liberty. The right to change is not explicitly enumerated in America’s founding documents but is everywhere implicit. The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) states that the purpose of government is to protect “certain unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, protects “freedom of speech [and] the ...