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.

The Third World Women’s Alliance: Lessons for today

 Al Jazeera English

In November of last year, The Washington Post reported that, nearly nine months after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, the disease was “ravag[ing] African American and other minority communities with a particular vengeance” – as Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian patients continued to perish at a far higher rate than white patients.

Then in April 2021, a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that Black women in the US suffered three times the coronavirus mortality rate of white men.

According to the study’s authors, the disparities in mortality had much to do with “the gendered and racialised nature of work, housing and living conditions, comorbidities, and access to care”.

Yet COVID-19 was not the canary in the coal mine that exposed US society as, well, downright sick. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Stop being polite – Colin Powell was a killer

 Al Jazeera English

Colin Powell has died, and the hagiographic obituaries are upon us.

The New York Times hails him as a “pathbreaker”: the United States’ first Black national security adviser, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, and secretary of state.

The rest of the US mainstream media have taken a similar line, erupting in characteristic American self-adulation at the idea that a once-discriminated-against Black man was able to make it so far in life.

MSNBC took the hagiography a step further by . . . titling its posthumous Powell segment: “Richard Haass: Colin Powell was grounded in reality”.

If Powell’s reality included non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other threats, what does “reality” even mean in the end? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why won’t Colombia let Martha Sepúlveda die?

 Al Jazeera English

At 7am on October 10, 51-year-old Martha Sepúlveda, a resident of the Colombian city of Medellín, was scheduled to die by euthanasia – and she could not have been happier.

“I’m a lot calmer since they authorised me to have the procedure,” Sepúlveda told the Colombian television network Noticias Caracol. “I laugh more, I sleep better.” Diagnosed in 2019 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease that has already rendered her unable to walk by herself, Sepúlveda was to have been the first person to be euthanised in Colombia without a prognosis of less than six months to live.

Although Colombia decriminalised euthanasia in 1997 in cases of terminal illness, the first such procedure was only approved in 2015. To date, a total of 157 patients have been permitted to end their lives in such fashion. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Afghans are the next victims of Italy’s war on refugees

 Al Jazeera English

Time for a quick quiz: Who, in the end, is the biggest victim of the whole Afghan crisis?

If you answered “Italy”, you’d be correct – at least in the view of the Italian right wing.

Consider, for starters, a recent article in the Italian newspaper Il Tempo, which warns that the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan will unleash an “unprecedented wave of migrants” – a veritable “migratory tsunami” – that will soon inundate Italy with millions of Afghans.

According to the article’s author, Afghan men often struggle to integrate into European society, and have already “committed hundreds of sexual aggressions against European women” – something European men obviously never do. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The social media blackout: What has the world come to?

 Al Jazeera English

When the great social media blackout of October 4, 2021, struck, I was in the picturesque village of Himarë in southern Albania with my feet propped up on a balcony railing, half-gazing at the Ionian Sea, while impatiently awaiting Al Jazeera’s publication of my latest article on New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

As the blackout happened to coincide with a local internet outage, I first dedicated myself to cursing the Albanian networks and manically refreshing all open tabs on my laptop.

When the internet returned but the components of Mark Zuckerberg’s digital empire – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – still failed to load, I sped over to Twitter to see what was wrong with the world.

And much, it seemed, was wrong with the world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Tom Friedman’s tribal tantrum

 Al Jazeera English

Oftentimes, Thomas Friedman articles are like the aftermath of car accidents: You know it is going to be bad, but you just cannot look away.

In one such recent dispatch – the journalistic equivalent, perhaps, of a head-on collision between two trailer trucks laden with combustible materials – the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist and bestselling author surmises:

“One day, 1,000 years from now, when they dig up this era, archaeologists will surely ask how was it that a great power called America set out to make the Middle East more like itself – embracing pluralism and the rule of law – and ended up instead becoming more like the Middle East – mimicking its worst tribal mores and introducing a whole new level of lawlessness into its national politics?”

While they are at it, archaeologists may also ask how it was that a man who argued that McDonald’s was the key to world peace and that the Beijing Olympics fuelled the Arab Spring ended up institutionalised at the US newspaper of record, where he was heavily remunerated for self-contradictory and cringe-inducing babble. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

It is time to abort Texas’s abortion law – and much more

 Al Jazeera English

On September 1, the state of Texas implemented Senate Bill 8 (SB8) banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of rape and incest.

Given that most women are not even aware they are pregnant at six weeks, SB8 amounts to a near-total abortion ban. It is the most restrictive such law in the entire United States, where the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling ostensibly offers constitutional protections for abortion rights.

In addition to being criminally invasive, the Texas law is totally unhinged. For starters, its enforcement is delegated not to agents of the state but rather to individual citizens who stand to win $10,000 or more by bringing lawsuits against doctors, abortion clinic staff, Uber drivers, and any other witting or unwitting accomplices to abortions performed after the six-week cutoff. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s Pegasus: Is your phone a ‘24-hour surveillance device’?

 Al Jazeera English

Between June 2020 and February 2021, the iPhones of nine Bahraini activists – including two dissidents exiled in London and three members of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights – were hacked using the Pegasus spyware that was developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyber-surveillance firm regulated by Israel’s defence ministry.

The hackings were revealed in a new report from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which has studied Pegasus extensively along with related nefarious modern phenomena.

As the Guardian notes, Pegasus is “perhaps the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed” and can turn a mobile phone into a “24-hour surveillance device” – harvesting messages, passwords, photos, internet searches, and other data and seizing control of the camera and microphone.

This can all be done via “zero-click” technology, meaning that one does not have to click on a compromised link or do anything else for one’s phone to become infected. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Getting jabbed in New York: Vaccines for a sick system?

Al Jazeera English

It was not my intention to get vaccinated against coronavirus in the United States of America.

Though I was born and raised in the US, I had abandoned it in 2003 in favour of global meandering through countries that, unlike my homeland, did not give me panic attacks – and where people behaved like human beings rather than alienated automatons.

I had not so much as set foot in the US since 2015, in the interest of my mental health and of avoiding eternal debt in the event of some sort of medical emergency – such being the perils of life in capitalist civilisations where basic rights like healthcare are converted into punitive, for-profit enterprises. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.