Watching the media coverage of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) just published book, The Evolving Threat of Antimicrobial Resistance – Options for Action, may teach us more about how the mainstream media operates than about this rapidly developing public health menace.

My book, An Execution in the Family, was released in Germany in 2008. The publisher brought me for a promotional tour in March of that year. I did a reading in Weimar, in the center of the country, and while I was there I toured the Buchenwald concentration camp, exactly three years ago today. I wrote the following shortly after returning home...

Noam Chomsky recently wrote that “two dark clouds … hover over all consideration of [the] global order: nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both literally threaten… the decent survival of the species.” (http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=PORTSIDE;b6d2f8ef.1202c).

Spring has come a month early to interior Southern New England, and that’s after the winter that wasn’t. In the Northeast several consecutive winters that included periods of intense cold and snow had lulled us into thinking that we were experiencing “old-fashioned weather” despite global warming. Many did not realize that the weather pattern of those winters concealed ongoing climatic warming. This year’s weather pattern maximized the impact of climate change and the vast majority of North America experienced the result. (I’m not surprised by this turn of events.

February 25th will mark the 60th anniversary of the United States Appeals Court’s affirmation of my parents’ conviction for Conspiracy to Commit Espionage. As I have explained before, my parents were convicted of conspiracy- not spying, espionage or treason as the mainstream media usually reports. Prosecutors like conspiracy charges because the law in this country holds everyone involved in the conspiracy responsible for all the acts of any of the conspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy.