Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas JS Davies
“Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of ‘end of empire’ moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis. In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.” (05/11/26)
“A Norwegian court said Monday that it will announce its verdict next month in the trial of the eldest son of Norway’s crown princess on charges including rape, following proceedings that cast a shadow over the royal family. The Oslo District Court said that the verdict in the case of Marius Borg Høiby will be delivered on June 15. During six weeks of court proceedings that ended on March 19, prosecutors sought a prison sentence of seven years and seven months for Høiby, who denies the rape allegations. Høiby, 29, is the son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit by a previous relationship and the stepson of Crown Prince Haakon, the heir to Norway’s throne. He is charged with 40 offenses in total, including four counts of rape between 2018 and 2024.” (05/11/26)
“A young liberal woman refused to cooperate with prosecutors after violent recidivist Rhamell Burke attacked her on the subway five weeks before he allegedly pushed a retired NYC teacher to his death on Thursday. Now the 23-year-old woman has regrets. ‘Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail,’ she told The Post. Maybe if she had indulged in less self-congratulatory empathy for the maniac who allegedly tried to kill her and felt more compassion for her fellow New Yorkers left to the mercy of an out-of-control predator roaming the streets, Ross Falzone would still be alive. But Falzone, 76, was unlucky enough to be entering the Chelsea subway station Thursday afternoon when Burke allegedly randomly shoved him down a flight of stairs, leaving the beloved ex-teacher to die hours later at Bellevue Hospital from a catastrophic brain injury.” (05/10/26)
“Pop star Dua Lipa has filed a $15m (£11m) lawsuit against Samsung, alleging it used her image on packaging for its televisions without permission. Lipa alleges that Samsung prominently used a photograph of her face without consent on various television models sold across the US, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Central District of California. Samsung’s packaging was ‘designed to improperly capitalize on Ms. Lipa’s hard-earned success to promote and sell Samsung’s products,’ the filing said. The BBC has contacted Samsung for comment. The lawsuit includes allegations of copyright infringement, trademark infringement and misappropriation of Lipa’s likeness and image. According to the lawsuit, the image was taken during the singer’s 2024 Austin City Limits Festival performance and Lipa owns the copyright to the photograph.” (05/11/26)
“It wasn’t until his junior year of college that civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons learned about a devastating massacre that took place in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. His African American studies professor lectured about what is known today as the Tulsa Race Massacre — the days in 1921 when white mobs carried out a scorched-earth campaign against an outnumbered Black militia protecting the fabled Black Wall Street, a prosperous all-Black community. ‘I actually told a teacher, ‘I’m from Tulsa. That’s not true,” Solomon-Simmons recalled. ‘And of course, I was wrong.’ That day planted a seed for the then-aspiring attorney, who went on to lead a reparations campaign for the living survivors of the massacre and their descendants. Nearly 105 years later, no one has been compensated for what they lost, and none of the culprits have been held accountable.” (05/11/26)
“The only reason we know that U.S. intelligence agencies will maintain their sweeping spying powers under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) through March 2027, irrespective of whether Congress extends the program ahead of its statutory deadline in mid-June, is because of the Fourth Estate. On April 9, The New York Times revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge who authorized the program’s annual recertification in a March 17 ruling ‘also objected to tools that agencies with access to the raw data … have created to allow analysts to process messages.’ In analyzing this data, the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) use filter tools to sift through queries for information on individuals who have communicated with foreign intelligence targets, thus making them legal targets for surveillance. Apparently, those tools are prone to misuse.” (05/11/26)
“For almost the entirety of the half century I have lived on Earth, I have had experts, teachers, politicians and activists hectoring me about how climate change is going to destroy the planet. But this week, in The New York Times, of all places, is evidence that climate alarmism is finally cooling down.’Democrats Do Not Have To Campaign On Climate Change Anymore,’ blared the headline, this week, as author Matt Huber argues that voters are rather turned off by the subject. I would like to suggest that this is because it is the single most expensive lie in human history.” [editor’s note: I’d say the single most expensive lie in history is “the state is necessary” – TLK] (05/10/26)
“Three years ago, the Biden Justice Department’s antitrust division sued a company called Agri Stats that should have made us all wonder what capitalism even means anymore. After all, is it a capitalist system when one company can get every participant in a market to give them proprietary information about inventory, production costs, pricing, and profit margins, allowing those participants to know exactly what their competitors are doing, enabling them to restrict supply or raise prices without consequences? The initial lawsuit against Agri Stats, which dealt in data for broiler chicken, turkey, and pork processors, described a collusion machine, complete with clip art of little stick figures pulling profits upward.” (05/08/26)
“Few figures loom larger in the moral and legal history of the 20th century than Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the word ‘genocide’ after losing nearly his entire family in the Holocaust. Lemkin witnessed the epitome of evil, and then gave the world the language to describe it. The word ‘genocide’ exists because he understood that what had been done to the Jewish people was so unprecedented that existing legal vocabulary could not define it properly. He spent the rest of his life ensuring that the world would never again lack the words — or the legal framework — to confront such crimes. That is precisely why what is happening now is so grotesque. The family of Raphael Lemkin is taking legal action against the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has hijacked his name and repurposed it for its own warped woke agenda.” (05/10/26)
“Just over halfway into the term of Guatemala’s reformist leader, the ‘democratic spring’ that he and his Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) sought to nurture is sending up fresh shoots of hope for lawful governance. President Bernardo Arévalo has appointed a new attorney general, marking what he calls ‘a new chapter’ for the small Central American nation. The outgoing attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, had tried to derail Mr. Arévalo’s 2024 inauguration, and has since obstructed multiple efforts to promote judicial impartiality and transparency. To many Guatemalans, Ms. Porras’ tenure symbolized entrenched political impunity and corruption that used the power of the state to settle scores with perceived enemies and make allowances for allies. In 2022, the United States cited her for repeatedly undermining anti-corruption efforts to ‘gain undue political favor.'” (05/08/26)
