In 2006, UN Member States did something unusual. Despite being unable to agree on a universal definition of terrorism, and having fought over whether terrorism truly had “root causes” or if that rhetoric was a perceived justification for terrorism, they managed to agree upon an overarching “global counterterrorism strategy” (GCTS). The Strategy is based on four pillars outlining measures to prevent and combat terrorism for states and for the wider UN system, including entities based at Headquarters (in New York and Vienna) and the field. Adopted by consensus in the General Assembly, the GCTS was notable not necessarily for its…

The Office of Special Counsel found Karine Jean-Pierre   in violation of the Hatch Act. US President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, violated a law prohibiting government employees from engaging in partisan politics and has received a warning letter from the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a nonprofit that filed a complaint against her revealed on Tuesday. Protect the Public’s Trust, run by former Trump administration official Michael Chamberlain, had objected to Jean-Pierre’s use of the phrase “mega MAGA Republican officials who don’t believe in the rule of law,” ahead of the 2022 midterms. In doing so, they claimed she violated…

Stephen Donald Black[7] (born July 28, 1953) is an American white supremacist.[7][8][9] He is the founder and webmaster of the anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Holocaust denial, homophobic, Islamophobic, and racist Stormfront Internet forum.[10][11][12][13] He was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and a member of the American Nazi Party in the 1970s,[14][15] though at the time he was a member it was known as the "National Socialist White Peoples' Party".[16] He was convicted in 1981 of attempting an armed overthrow of the government in the island of Dominica in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act.[17][18] Early life[edit] Black was born in Athens, Alabama, and became a white supremacy advocate at an early age when he began handing out swastika-adorned pamphlets from the National Socialist White People's Party at his…

That the United States is facing a new Cold War with China seems more a matter of “when” than “if.” For many U.S. politicians and pundits, this framing is evocative. U.S. collective memory of the Cold War skews triumphal. Many Americans remember then-President Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, exhorting his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall!” And the Berlin Wall did fall, demolished by those it had been constructed to contain. Shortly thereafter, the Iron Curtain collapsed, with students swarming the statue of St. Wenceslas in Prague and the Pan-European Picnic at the Austrian-Hungarian border. Gradually,…

In the spring of 2004, Alexander Cockburn and I met Gore Vidal for lunch in Los Angeles.  He seemed a little down to me. It had only been a few months since Howard Austen had died and he was clearly still missing his longtime partner and the life they shared at Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. But it didn’t take long for Alex to get the great man jump-started. “So, Gore, are you having second thoughts about your Dauphin?” Cockburn was referring to Christopher Hitchens, naturally, who a few years earlier Vidal had anointed as his successor in the ranks…