Fear and loathing on the US-Mexico border

 Al Jazeera English

On November 8, 2021, the United States reopened its borders to eligible international travellers who are fully vaccinated against coronavirus, thereby ending the restrictions on “non-essential travel” that were implemented at the outset of the pandemic in March 2020.

Of course, US borders are never really “open” to the majority of the Earth’s population – vaccinated or not – such being the nature of imperial hypocrisy in a world where the US is free to transcend other people’s borders, military and economically, while closing its own frontiers to, inter alia, individuals fleeing US-imposed military and economic havoc. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

An ode to train travel

 Al Jazeera English

At the end of September, I took an overnight train called the Doğu Ekspresi – or Eastern Express – from the Turkish capital Ankara to the city of Kars in the northeast, close to the Armenian border.

I cannot say precisely how the journey came about, or what sort of neuronal firing must have transpired in my brain the previous month as I lay sweating in between the oscillating fans on either side of my bed on the Oaxacan coast of Mexico – the position in which I had undertaken to plan my first transatlantic trip since December 2019.

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, I had led a pathologically itinerant existence for nearly 20 years, flitting continuously between countries and continents and harbouring an existential aversion to settling down.

Coronavirus had put an abrupt end to the arrangement, converting what was meant to be a two-week stay in Oaxaca into a heretofore inconceivable year and a half. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Havana Syndrome: an act of war or just an act?

Al Jazeera English

Once upon a time in Havana, Cuba, a strange thing happened.

United States diplomats and CIA emissaries to the country began reporting the sudden onset of debilitating symptoms, ranging from headaches and hearing loss to vertigo and nausea. As The New York Times notes, the symptoms were “brought on, most of [the victims] said, by a piercing, high-pitched sound, as though they had been caught in ‘an invisible beam of energy’”.

The inexplicable phenomenon, which was first recorded in 2016, was dubbed “Havana Syndrome”, and was initially hyped as potentially being caused by some sort of Cuban sonic weapon.

Never mind the US State Department’s assessment that the high-pitched sound in question was most probably emitted by the Indies short-tailed cricket. A global superpower should never miss an opportunity to malign a tiny communist island for being a thorn in the side of the empire. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

On the death of my maternal grandmother: an anti-obituary

 Al Jazeera English

On October 18, Colin Powell – former United States secretary of state and war criminal – died of coronavirus-related complications.

The following day, as I was busy writing an article for Al Jazeera titled “Stop being polite – Colin Powell was a killer”, my maternal grandmother Anne died of coronavirus in Florida.

And as with Powell, I felt no need for eulogies.

My grandmother, of course, had wielded considerably less power during her time on earth than had the late statesman. She had not helped fuel the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, or presided over the 1989 pulverisation of the impoverished Panamanian neighbourhood of El Chorillo – to the extent that local ambulance drivers had begun referring to the area as “Little Hiroshima”.

She had, however, managed to inflict significant psychological, as well as bodily, injury on the persons inhabiting her own little world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.