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.

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.