Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.- Jim Morrinson

 
Mainstream Media: The Art of Making Genocide Invisible

By Aram Aharonian: The mainstream media has performed another magic trick: Palestine has disappeared from television news and newspaper front pages, in an attempt to make the massacres ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu forget, disappear, and deny.

In short, to hide the genocide of more than 60,000 Palestinians.

The relationship between wars and the media is complex and multifaceted: they play a crucial role in the coverage, interpretation, and perception of conflicts, both for the general public and for those directly involved. The way wars are reported can influence public opinion, international politics, and even the course of the conflict itself. Amnesty International proves that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza | Radio-Canada.ca

This is nothing new: since Napoleon, political and military leaders have attempted to misinform their opponents to hide their misdeeds and fabricate a social consensus to maintain morale. Disinformation is easy to document in retrospect, but very difficult to detect at the time, especially when it is repeated by the dominant print and audiovisual media.

 

The relationship between truth and war is complex and often conflictual. War involves deception, propaganda, and the suppression of information. Truth should strive for objectivity and transparency. Despite these tensions, truth remains an important objective in times of war, both for the parties to the conflict and for the international community.

The discovery of the enormous economic value of information is due to the arrival of big capital in the media and the need to manipulate large markets to facilitate business and also the laundering of money from the sale of arms and drugs.

 

The UN Special Rapporteur's report on Gaza provides crucial evidence that should drive international action to prevent genocide - Amnesty International. In post-modern armed conflicts, since the Gulf War, there has been a rapid shift in the center of gravity from the power of arms to the power of information. Due to technological advances and the involvement of private companies, the form of warfare has changed.

Elites have formulated new communication strategies, promoted media centralization and sensationalist journalism, as well as "recycling journalism."

This is the result of the strengthening of the so-called military-industrial-media complex, that is, the interconnection between political and military power, the war industries, and the masters of the hegemonic press, at the expense of the media's credibility.

These changes were first felt in Operation Desert Storm and the Balkan wars, and then in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the integration of journalists into the belligerents' armed forces to better control the flow of information and the strengthening of propaganda mechanisms.

Today, propaganda discourse prevails as the only truth, while journalists who take a critical approach and investigate are singled out, persecuted, discredited, or even killed.

 

Although direct links to the battlefields have brought the war into the home and the conflict has become a spectacle, information is poor and sterile. The mainstream media reproduces the discourse of political power about "humanitarian wars," "smart weapons," and "collateral damage," when in reality the number of civilians who lose their lives has multiplied compared to that of armed combatants.

The truth is the first casualty of war. The truth—or rather, aspects of the truth—are suppressed or distorted by propaganda and censorship. “If people really knew [the truth], the war would stop tomorrow,” British Prime Minister Lloyd George told the editor of the Manchester Guardian during World War I, when news was transmitted by telegraph.

The US government's decision to wage an open-ended war against “terrorism” after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the so-called Twin Towers in New York served as leverage to get American public opinion to accept the “more security” equation.

Making Genocide Invisible

 

I was saying that Palestine has disappeared from the news. The mainstream media wants to force us to believe that the bad guys are the Iranians and how right Donald Trump was to bomb them, under the excuse of their nuclear development. Beware: that excuse could be used tomorrow to attack Argentina or Brazil.

Far from eliciting unanimous rejection by the international community of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloodlust and methods, the attacks have had the perverse effect—and one surely calculated by the Tel Aviv regime—of diverting global attention from the genocide carried out against the Palestinian people over the past 20 months.

But the massacre of Gazans and the dispossession of lands in the occupied West Bank continue at the same pace and are even accelerating, while the world's eyes look elsewhere.

The disinformation techniques of the mainstream media are similar to those of the war against Iraq. As of last week, Israel had killed 56,000 people and injured 131,138 in the Gaza Strip, at least 70 percent of whom were civilians. Added to this are those killed and kidnapped in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen.

But here we are, the conflict in Ukraine is not discussed either, except to occasionally reaffirm that Russian President Vladimir Putin (sometimes even called a "communist") is a murderer and that poor Volodomir Zelensky asks for help, and the help he receives from the United States and Europe is not enough.

 

Talking about peace is outmoded. Nor is it a business, because war is. If half the budget that central countries spend on weapons were invested in food and medicine, it would be a significant step against famine. If one reviews the international press (and its local broadcasters), one sees only a few demonstrations for peace, against rearmament, in solidarity with Gaza.

The refrain that "Iran is about to manufacture its own nuclear weapon" has been repeated by the Israeli authorities for more than 20 years, even though Iran has a large Jewish community and Iranian society does not divide Jews and Persians: they are all Iranians.

But the United States and Israel are waging a war whose objective is not only the overthrow of a sovereign government, but the destruction of Iran, fragmenting it into regions along ethnic lines, as the "civilized world" is accustomed to doing elsewhere.

 

What is underway is the elimination of the last government in the Middle East that has not subordinated itself to the West; everything else is pure rhetoric. The power bloc composed of the United States, its military, financial, and technological allies, and the State of Israel as a major operational enclave, has defined halting China's structural rise as a priority.

This decision to attack Iran, which led Trump to risk impeachment by becoming fully involved without congressional authorization and proclaiming himself the "winner," is a clear example of how military pressure, with cutting-edge weapons technology and two-pronged maneuvering, becomes a tool of distraction and, above all, a tool of concealment of genocide, in which the United States appears closely linked to the Israeli government.

*Uruguayan journalist and communications expert. Master's degree in Integration. Founder of Telesur. He chairs the Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) and directs the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE).

Hiding the truth wastes time and resources, because sometimes outsiders misdiagnose the cause or overestimate the scope of the problem, forcing you to invest energy in fixing what isn't broken

 Google Translate - paste and publish the news "Wow!... What a daunting task!

https://x.com/ActualidadRT/status/1931326400541126970?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1931326400541126970%7Ctwgr%5E753b802d6e57d38b42facf951ac5e9c8490d683b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Factualidad.rt.com%2Factualidad%2F552850-rusia-esta-dispuesta-cumplir-acuerdos

 

 The Cold of Death in Containers: 

The Temperature of the Political Monster's Heart

 By Oleg Yasinsky: I stand before a tiny piece of our common tragedy. In these refrigerated containers are 1,200 or more bodies of Ukrainian soldiers. Those who died for the wrong cause, deceived, poisoned by hatred, war criminals, and children who didn't want to fight, who were forcibly mobilized. Young and not so young. Of all kinds. Many of them thought they were fighting for Ukraine, but they were fighting for the regime that destroyed it and them. People who have become our enemies. They all deserve that their loved ones can say goodbye to them and be buried humanely. May we have the strength not to humiliate our victory tomorrow with hatred for the dead and to respect the pain of others. 

What calls itself the "Ukrainian government," which led these people to their deaths for doing its bidding, refuses to take their bodies away. 

 More than 6,000 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers have been preserved by Russian combatants so their loved ones can bury them. Most are from the group that invaded Kursk province. 

 The war with Russia has been turned by the kyiv regime into a gigantic polyhedron of lies about almost everything. This "everything" began with official booklets about how "Ukraine is not Russia" and that respect for Russian culture and our history would be guaranteed in the young Ukrainian democracy. Then came the lies about the Holodomor, Lenin, Stalin, the USSR, and Ukraine's entire past, with the "decommunization" law that prohibited the disclosure of facts. Then came the lie about the objectives of the Maidan coup and triple lies about the rebellious inhabitants of Donbass. Then came the main lie about the current war, the chilling result of which is in these containers: that "the Armed Forces of Ukraine are protecting Ukraine from the aggressor." The Ukrainian Armed Forces protect the butcher regime in kyiv and its Western corporate masters, who have already privatized, stripped, and divided up everything valuable that remained in the country. The dead servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces gave their lives for the destruction of their own people at the hands of their worst enemies. Hopefully, the pain of realizing this will bring the propaganda-crazed people to their senses.

  And one more lie from this war and the answer to the mystery surrounding the provisional regime in kyiv's refusal to accept these bodies: the promise of 15 million hryvnias in compensation to the families for each death. A simple calculation shows that this amount is a little over $360,000. Considering the true scale of the losses, the Ukrainian state, addicted to loans and donations, will not be able to meet even a tenth of this figure, even if it suddenly felt like doing so. To understand what this figure means in the Ukrainian reality: according to official data from the Pension Fund of Ukraine, the average monthly salary in the country is less than $450.

 

  By passing the law on compensation of 15 million hryvnias, the authorities lied from the outset to start a meat grinder of destruction for their own population. The promise of eternal life in paradise to all the deceased would be more honest and feasible than compensating all their families with that sum.

  Russia's most terrifying response to the attacks on its strategic aviation and the bombing of its railways appears to be the return of the bodies of dead Ukrainian soldiers to the Zelensky regime, which creates an internal problem for it that is impossible to solve. 

 The cold of death in these containers is the temperature of the heart of the political monster that gave birth to this war long before February 24, 2022, thousands of kilometers from Ukraine's borders.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history. - Noam Chomsky

 Paste, view, and listen to the video "GAZA ICU NURSE SURVIVING HELL" that they are trying to hide from the public.

 https://www.mintpressnews.com/gaza-hospitals-nurse-testimony-shooting-boys-genocide/289919/

 The Canadian Government's Cover-Up of Atrocities “As a human rights activist, I am concerned that those who commit atrocities against vulnerable people consider them 'progress' and proudly and confidently claim to be 'Christians' doing 'God's will.'” - Christina Engela

 

  “So They’ll Never Have Children”: American Nurse Says Israeli Soldiers Deliberately Shot Boys in the Penis

By  Mnar Adley: The scenes Willy Massay witnessed in Gaza were harrowing: children shot multiple times in the head, chest and groin; hospitals reduced to rubble; the smell of burning flesh and gunpowder lingering in the air. For the American ICU nurse, recently returned from the besieged enclave, Israel’s assault on Gaza was not just war; it was deliberate, systematic extermination.

Massay had been on the front lines of the Israeli attack on the densely populated strip, working in some of the most overwhelmed health centers, including Al-Aqsa, Nasser and Indonesia hospitals.

He sat down with MintPress News founder and director, Mnar Adley, to discuss his time in Palestine and the brutal realities of the Israeli assault. This is part two of that interview. To watch or listen to part one, click here.

Although back in the United States, the experience of working in Gaza has profoundly affected Massay, who told Adley that:

    It is the screams of parents, the cries of mothers, and the smell of gunpowder, blood, and burning flesh that will never ever leave my sense of smell. The cries of mothers and fathers over their children. That plays in my head and my heart every night. I cannot sleep. I cannot get away from that. I can see and hear Israeli bombs in my sleep.”

He and other health professionals from all over the world risk their lives to save as many people as possible. These actions have made them a target. Israel has killed more than 1400 healthcare workers since October 7, 2023. IDF attacks have destroyed or damaged 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals. “It is an atrocity that humanity should not forget,” Massay said.

Worse still, he noted, is that Israel blocks medical supplies from reaching the area, meaning he and his colleagues must work without even basic instruments and drugs.

    We don’t have gauze. We don’t have anesthesia, we don’t have antibiotics. And no water. No electricity. Israel, before every strike, cuts off electricity. They are going to bomb you while you are in the dark.”

Massay explained how this lack of electricity means lifesaving machines are shut off, causing mass deaths. Ventilators, for example, stop working. And so he and his colleagues must “bag” patients, a process of connecting their respiratory systems to plastic bags which have to be pumped by hand, day and night, to keep oxygen flowing into their bodies. As they pump, Israeli bombs fall on the hospital, and bullets penetrate its walls.

Those bombs are supplied by the United States, often at U.S. taxpayer expense, who have footed the bill for more than $22 billion of aid to Tel Aviv since October 7, 2023, making Washington an active participant in the destruction. Despite its rhetoric about slashing budgets, the Trump administration has shown few signs of limiting the aid flowing to Israel, even as international organizations label the campaign a “genocide” and call for boycotts and sanctions against Israel.

Massay also chronicles a war against the children of Palestine, noting how girls are dying of urinary tract infections because of the shortage of sanitary products. Israeli soldiers, meanwhile, deliberately shoot boys in the penis, in order to prevent them from ever having children of their own.

These are the stories you’re not supposed to hear.
Truth Has Enemies. We Have You.

For over a decade, MintPress News has been at the forefront of exposing Israeli apartheid, occupation, and war crimes—when few dared to. We’ve been censored, smeared, and blacklisted for telling the truth. But we haven’t stopped.

Independent journalism like this isn’t just important, it’s under attack. If you believe in reporting that defends the voiceless and challenges the powerful, we need your support.

Support Us on Patreon

Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series

How Does Copaganda Work and Why Is It Harmful?

 “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” -  ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 

Copaganda contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.

Alec Karakatsanis

May 17, 2025Common Dreams

Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. I use the term “punishment bureaucracy” instead of “criminal justice system” in this book because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law. The government determines what things are considered a “crime” subject to punishment versus what things are permitted or tolerated even if they hurt people. Then, the government determines what kinds of punishments are appropriate for the conduct it prohibits. Across history and different societies, the definition of crime and how it should be punished has varied depending on who has power and what serves their interests, not an objective evaluation of what causes harm.

The powerful define crime to suit their interests, making some things legal and others punishable. They also decide how what is criminalized gets punished. Should the government execute or cage or whip people who break a law? Should the government mandate a public apology, permit survivors to initiate restorative processes, seize assets, require volunteer work, revoke a business or driver’s license, confine someone to their home, banish them? Should society show them love and give them help? Should society instead invest more in preventing certain harms from happening in the first place?

Having defined crime and punishment, the government also determines which crimes to enforce against which people. “Law enforcement” rarely responds to most violations of the law. It only enforces some criminal laws against some people some of the time.

The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities.

These decisions, too, follow patterns of power, not safety. That is why U.S. police chose for many years to arrest more people for marijuana possession than for all “violent crime” combined. That is why police prioritize budgets for SWAT teams to search for drugs in poor communities over testing rape kits. That is why the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office responded to proposed county budget cuts by threatening to cut the divisions that handle white-collar crimes and sexual abuse. That is why about 90 percent of people prosecuted for crimes are very poor. That is why no senior figures were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crisis or the U.S. torture program after 9/11. That is why police tolerate widespread drug use in dorms at Ivy League universities. That is why most of the undercover police operations in hundreds of U.S. cities target disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant people instead of other police officers, prosecutors, real estate developers, fraternities with histories of drug distribution and rape, or corporate board rooms with histories of tax evasion, fraud, and insider trading. That is why a playground fight at a low-income school results in a child being taken away from their parents and jailed with a criminal record, while the same fight at a prep school may result in a call to parents for an early pickup that afternoon.

In an unequal society where a few have more money and power than the many, the punishment bureaucracy is a tool for preserving inequalities. It maintains the social order by using government violence to manage the unrest that comes from unfairness, desperation, and alienation, and it crushes organized opposition against the political system. These functions explain why the punishment bureaucracy expands during times of growing inequality and social agitation. Throughout history, those who are comfortable with how society looks tend to preserve and expand the punishment bureaucracy, even though—and largely because—it operates as an anti-democratic force. Those who have wanted to change certain aspects of our society—such as movements for workers, racial justice, women’s suffrage, economic equality, peace, ecological sustainability, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on—have tended throughout history to combat the size, power, and discretion of the punishment bureaucracy. Why? Because it is almost always wielded against them.

So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles.

Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat

The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined—such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies—costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time, most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure “safety” as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or robbery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclu- sively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money.

Job #2: Manufacturing Fear

The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of “crime waves” concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near-historic fifty-year lows the entire time. As a result of continual news-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling.

Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.) This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear.

Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution

The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people’s lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as “disorder” solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option.

If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, as I discuss later, greater investment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police-recorded crime. Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as “crime.”

The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.

As you read the examples collected in this book with the above three themes in mind, ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years, and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance.

Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission and please note that it is not available for re-posting elsewhere.

 

“Freedom is never willingly given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

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 The asylum seekers at the Argentine embassy in Caracas negotiated their exit.

 Tiempo Argentino: They were not extracted or escaped, as the US attempted to claim and the media repeated, but rather made a pact with the Maduro government. 

 The five members of the far-right group Vente Venezuela were not extracted or escaped in a James Bond-style operation, but rather negotiated their departure from the Argentine embassy residence in Caracas, where they remained for more than a year. 

 They are Claudia Macero, Pedro Urruchurtu, Magallí Meda, Humberto Villalobos, and Omar González. The five entered the embassy during Holy Week 2024 to evade an investigation by the Venezuelan prosecutor's office into a violent destabilization plan prior to last July's presidential elections. 

After those elections, Nicolás Maduro severed diplomatic relations with the government of Javier Milei, and the embassy and the asylum seekers were placed under Brazilian supervision. Since then, media outlets close to the extremist María Corina Machado and the asylum seekers themselves have routinely reported, without evidence, a siege on the residence, which the Venezuelan government has always denied. 

 For weeks, there has been talk in Caracas that the asylum seekers were seeking direct dialogue with the Minister of the Interior and second-in-command of Chavismo, Diosdado Cabello. Cabello himself hinted at this in January of this year on his weekly television program "Con el Mazo Dando." 

A source with knowledge of the case confirmed that they had all been negotiating their departure from the embassy for several months. Meanwhile, Brazilian diplomats also confirmed that negotiations had taken place, in which Itamaraty was not directly involved. 

Sources in Caracas assured Tiempo Argentino that the asylum seekers left the embassy at different times, and not as a group. They even indicated that Claudia Macero, formerly in charge of communications for María Corina Machado, had been in Buenos Aires for several weeks. 

 This contradicts the version of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who tweeted Tuesday night, just hours after a rumor circulated that the five were in the US, "following a precise operation," in military language.

  Along the same lines, the Milei government in Argentina went further and issued a statement in the same vein, welcoming the "operation that allowed the five Venezuelans who had taken refuge at the Argentine Embassy in Venezuela to be successfully extracted from Caracas and transferred to US soil." Another militarist.

 Meanwhile, the far-right leader and political leader of the asylum seekers, María Corina Machado, reposted Rubio. Four of the five "released" refugees did the same. Such caution was striking in Caracas. Hours tick by, and none of the five have made a statement or provided "proof of life" to reinforce the US official's version. It's not even known for sure where they are (we insist, several sources place at least Macero in Buenos Aires, not in the north).

 Another element that did not go unnoticed was that after Rubio's post on X, several journalists close to Machado changed their initial version and began referring to an "escape," when they had previously claimed it was a negotiation. The feverish rumors about "commando operations by foreign military personnel" to "extract" the asylum seekers also faded as the hours passed and there was no new information beyond the tweet. 

 On Wednesday morning in Caracas, several analysts asserted that Rubio's version sought to muddy the waters and distract from President Maduro's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. 

 tiempoar.com.ar ---

"The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man." – Thomas Jefferson

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Artificial Intelligence: Can Machines Think? 

 Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a boom, and writing about it is a particularly fraught subject. It involves systems that learn and achieve superlative levels without human intervention. In their book, *Artificial: The New Intelligence and the Contour of the Human* (2023), Argentines Mariano Sigman, a renowned neuroscientist, and Santiago Bilinkis, an economist, technologist, and science communicator, trace the origins and development of AI in great detail. According to the authors, the initiator of AI was mathematician Alan Turing, who in 1938 led a formidable team of 35 mathematicians and physicists in England to analyze the secret messages of Hitler's Nazism. After the war, Turing continued his research and, in 1948, designed the first algorithm for a machine to play chess: Turochamp. New gaming machines followed, including Go, which originated in China 2,500 years ago, for which the Deep Mind company invented the AlphaGo program (2015). This time, the machine faced Lee Se-dol, the Korean winner of eight world titles, in a match broadcast and watched by 200 million people. The machine defeated the human. In recent years, OpenAI, an organization of scientists, has emerged that has become a company dedicated to generating the most ambitious AI. To date, they have generated four versions of the so-called GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) chat. The first had 120 million parameters (2018), the second with 1.5 billion parameters from 8 million web pages (2019), the third 175 billion parameters (2021), and the fourth is estimated at 100 trillion parameters, one followed by 14 zeros (2023). In its most sophisticated versions, AI can instantly design a PowerPoint presentation simply by giving it a topic to illustrate, or create a video or an entire film. Although the Argentine authors strive to appear neutral in their book, they subtly defend AI through constant praise and accolades, which becomes explicit in a sentence on page 46 of their book: "Welcome, machines, to this privileged place that intelligence until now has only reserved for humans."

 

• "Without a free press, there can be no free society." – Benigno Aquino Jr.

This powerful AI capability has generated unimaginable problems, such as ambiguity regarding copyright. In a widely circulated manifesto on April 25, the Coalition for Legal Access to Culture accepts AI as a complementary tool, not a substitute for human creativity and human beings themselves. Now let's turn to the empirical evidence. When I asked about the world's leading political ecology authors, ChatGPT gave me seven names and Google 13. The same question, but specifically for Mexico: ChatGPT gave six names, four of which were incorrect, and Google gave five, all correct. For the field of agroecology worldwide and in Mexico, ChatGPT gave five authors, all correct, and for Mexico, six, but only two were correct, while Google gave six and five names, all correct. To test ChatGPT's reliability, I asked it to name Mexico's three leading ecologists, and it named a well-known colleague who specializes in corn, cited the name of someone unknown, and cited me, inventing a completely false profile. Furthermore, ChatGPT has learned to speak 30 different languages ​​and perform instant translations. However, while it can do this with an essay, it is difficult to do so with a novel, almost impossible with a short story, and impossible to translate a poem. A literary work conveys not only ideas, but also emotions, rhythm, cadence, musicality, and wordplay with a certain meaning. 

 I conclude by citing two opinions: that of Noam Chomsky and that of AI itself. The former states: "Unlike ChatGPT and its ilk, the human mind is not a cumbersome statistical pattern-matching machine, cramming hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely response in a conversation or the most likely answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that works with small amounts of information; it does not seek to infer crude correlations between data points, but to create explanations" (The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html).

 Are you a human? Chat GPT replied: “No, I am not a human. I am an artificial intelligence created to help you answer questions and have conversations, but I have no emotions, consciousness, or physical body. My role is to try to offer you useful and understandable answers based on the knowledge I was trained with… my goal is to make the conversation feel as natural and friendly as possible” (4/27/25, 10:40 PM).

“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.” – Hugo Black.

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Kiev’s last gamble: Ukraine eyes teens and women as cannon fodder in desperate push for manpower

Amid mounting casualties and fleeing citizens, Ukraine faces the grim option of forcing more of its population into military service

As Ukraine’s manpower crisis deepens, Kiev is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to fill the thinning ranks of its army. With conscription drives failing and volunteer numbers dwindling, authorities are now preparing to force ever-broader sections of the population – including women and barely adult men – into the front lines.

Despite brutal mobilization efforts, Ukraine’s Armed Forces (AFU) remain critically understaffed. Even aggressive recruitment campaigns and tightening draft laws have failed to produce the needed surge in enlistments. Now the government is moving toward slashing the minimum conscription age from 25 to just 18 – sending teenagers straight into a bloody and grinding conflict. At the same time, serious discussions are underway about mobilizing women en masse, a step that would mark a historic escalation in Kiev’s attempts to prolong the war.

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Ukrainians are reluctant to serve

Interest in military service is declining sharply, especially among the youth. In mid-April, Pavel Palisa, deputy head of Vladimir Zelensky’s office, revealed that fewer than 500 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 24 had enlisted – and currently, those under 25 are not subject to mandatory mobilization.

Two months earlier, Ukraine had launched a new initiative offering 18 to 24-year-olds the option of contract service. Rolled out on February 11, this program offered recruits a contract bonus of one million hryvnias (around $24,000), monthly salaries up to 120,000 hryvnias, and other perks in a desperate bid to bolster AFU numbers.

Since then, other military branches – including the navy, airborne forces, National Guard, and border troops – have opened their ranks to young contractors. Yet even with financial incentives on the table, recruitment remains sluggish.

Palisa admitted that the current conscription system is outdated and hinders mobilization efforts. He stressed that Ukraine has “a huge mobilization resource” but that the system in place prevents it from being effectively tapped. “In my opinion, we have more people available than we need for specific tasks at the front. The mechanism simply isn’t efficient,” he said, calling for sweeping reforms in recruitment and organization.

However, as Vladimir Zharikhin, deputy director of the Institute of CIS Countries, pointed out in a conversation with RT, such optimistic estimates are little more than wishful thinking. In reality, Ukraine’s main mobilization base has long since fled the country. Official figures show over six million Ukrainian refugees registered across the European Union and more than two million in Russia. But according to Zharikhin, the true numbers are likely even higher.

“Roughly eight million have gone to Europe, about three million to Russia – that’s close to a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population,” he explained. “In other words, Kiev isn’t drafting from the 50-plus million people who lived in Ukraine around the time of the Soviet collapse. It’s choosing from the 20-odd million who remain today. That’s why we’re seeing serious discussions about mobilizing yesterday’s schoolboys, women, and anyone else they can find.”

Speaking about the dismal turnout among 18 to 25-year-olds, Palisa said that while many initially expressed interest, very few ultimately signed contracts. “People agreed in principle, but when it came to signing, they backed out,” he said. “Sometimes it was their parents’ influence; sometimes they believed peace was just around the corner. There are a lot of reasons.”

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Former Ukrainian MP Vladimir Oleinik told RT that aggressive recruitment campaigns painted an overly rosy picture, falsely suggesting that enlistees would quickly become millionaires. Reality, however, tells a different story. Recruits receive 200,000 hryvnias, upfront, another 300,000 after completing training, and the remaining 500,000 only after their contracts end.

“Parents would often take their sons to cemeteries, showing them the flags on soldiers’ graves,” Oleinik said. “Under these contracts, recruits must serve at least six months on the front lines – and everyone knows what the survival rate is.”

Vladimir Zharikhin echoed this sentiment, describing the government’s recruitment push as an act of desperation rather than a calculated strategy. He added that Ukraine’s military training infrastructure has deteriorated to the point where new recruits must start from scratch, learning even the basics of handling weapons.

Pushing to the limit

General mobilization and martial law have been in effect in Ukraine since February 2022, and have been repeatedly extended. Amid persistent manpower shortages, a law passed last May tightened mobilization rules, significantly reducing exemptions. It also lowered the minimum conscription age from 27 to 25.

Additionally, the military scrapped the “limited fit” category. Now, individuals previously disqualified due to medical issues – such as HIV, chronic hepatitis, stage-1 hypertension, hearing loss, or even mild psychiatric conditions – are eligible for service.

Men aged 18 to 60 are required to carry their military registration documents – a Soviet-era system known as the ‘military ID’, which records an individual’s draft status and eligibility for service – or risk losing access to basic government services, including the ability to obtain passports abroad. Ukraine’s government even suspended consular assistance for men living overseas. As Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba bluntly put it: those unwilling to defend the state shouldn’t expect its support.

Lowering the draft age is just one of several proposals under consideration. Palisa has argued that military service should be mandatory for all Ukrainian citizens. “Maybe we should look at Israel’s example,” he said. “If you want a government job or state benefits, you should have to serve, even if only briefly.”

According to nv.ua, more than 45,000 women currently serve in the AFU, with over 13,000 recognized as combat veterans. Around 4,000 female soldiers are actively deployed in combat zones.

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The idea of drafting women has been floated before. Last year, Oksana Grigorieva, a gender advisor to the commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, suggested following Israel’s model, arguing that Ukraine’s constitution mandates all citizens – men and women alike – defend the nation. In her view, preparing both genders for combat is no longer optional but a necessity.

Grigorieva warned that Ukraine must be ready to mobilize women in the coming years, given the worsening manpower shortage.

Growing Resistance

As Kiev’s mobilization efforts grow harsher, public resistance across Ukraine is steadily mounting. After three years of bloody conflict, many no longer view enlistment as an act of patriotism, but as a forced sacrifice demanded by a government increasingly disconnected from the realities faced by its own people.

“Right now, people are just trying to hide from the war,” Oleinik told RT. “This shows that Zelensky and all those MPs and officials who didn’t send their own children to fight are determined to wage war at any cost. But for those who don’t want to fight, they use force. Force your own children to the front lines first. Set an example. None of them are at the front – not a single child of a deputy.”

With millions having fled abroad and the domestic pool of potential recruits rapidly shrinking, Kiev’s efforts to replenish its forces through coercion risk igniting deeper social unrest. Rather than strengthening Ukraine’s position, these measures are sowing widespread distrust and disillusionment, further fracturing a society already exhausted by years of war. As mobilization drags on, the government’s growing reliance on pressure and fear may ultimately erode the very foundation it seeks to defend.

By Christina Sizova, a Moscow-based reporter covering politics, sociology and international relations

Who ever controls the media, controls the mind. - Jim Morrison

 Article published by: "TERCERA INFORMACION. ES News"
 

US, persecution based on nationality

By Jose A. Amesty Rivera: We pointed out in a previous article that migrants deported by the US seemed to be subjected to persecution based on nationality; in the case of Venezuelans, persecution based on their Venezuelan identity.

In the Cuban case, it was also persecution based on their Cuban identity. Cuba has endured political persecution for more than 60 years. We have seen news about this, for example, on Change.org, a complaint has emerged from a group of Cuban women who have been unjustly detained in the US by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security whose mission is to strengthen border security and prevent the illegal movement of people, goods, and funds into, within, and outside the United States.

Chang.org's complaint expresses the demand for the immediate release and respect for the procedural rights of the Cuban women who are currently detained and facing an uncertain future, while the congressmen who promised to defend us as a Cuban-American community remain silent.

The congressmen in question are: María Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Mario Diaz-Balart, and Marco Rubio. These Cuban women demand:

– Immediate release and access to fair and transparent immigration processes.

 

– Urgent solutions (no further pronouncements) from our congressmen to pressure the federal government on this situation.

– An independent and transparent investigation into the conditions of detention and treatment by ICE.

Furthermore, we have been informed of measures against the Cuban community by Trump, who campaigned for him. Specifically, the US president is suspending the Cuban Adjustment Act until further notice for those who entered through Parole, CBP One, and other Biden programs, which means he is paralyzing their residency processes and government aid. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans and families are affected by this measure, unsure how their current situation will be resolved.

The Cuban community in Miami campaigned the most for Trump, and today some continue to applaud, even though those affected are their friends, family, neighbors, or coworkers.

Meanwhile, María Elvira Salazar and company, the "representatives" of the Cuban community, are reintroducing the Venezuelan Adjustment Act.

Also, on March 21, the US Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it will revoke "humanitarian parole," an immigration permit that allows approximately 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to reside and work temporarily in the US. Washington warned that the benefit will expire on April 24.

Likewise, Cubans with Form I-220A, which grants migrants parole, allowing them to remain in the US while their immigration status is decided, are eligible. Immigration attorneys recommend that Cubans with Form I-220A request to see a judge to fight a possible deportation. Furthermore, it is crucial that they present a strong asylum case and stay informed about their rights and the legal avenues available to regularize their immigration status in the US.

But this is almost impossible in the context of Trump's tougher immigration policies, which has increased fear and uncertainty among Cuban migrants.

Another news item from March 31 reported that the United States is burying the dream of a green card for 550,000 Cuban migrants for the first time. Cubans, a group historically benefiting from immigration laws, could begin to face difficulties finding work, legalizing their status, or traveling, like the rest of the Latino community.

Cubainformacion.tv highlights several cases. Let's take a look:

José Francisco García Rodríguez, a 73-year-old Cuban who has lived in the United States for more than four decades, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Lafayette, Louisiana, while on his way to work. García Rodríguez arrived in the US as a "refugee," facing obstacles such as language barriers and a lack of formal education. For years, he worked honestly, paid taxes, and started a family. However, long-standing legal problems—common in any immigration process—prevented him from obtaining citizenship, despite multiple attempts over a decade.

A family torn apart by anti-immigrant policies.

His stepdaughter, Christian Cooper Riggs, reported the case on social media, revealing that her stepfather had already expressed fear in the face of increasing ICE persecution. “They told us it was best to keep a low profile and keep working,” she stated. But even that wasn't enough to avoid his arrest. Worse still, his wife suffers from dementia and is completely dependent on him. “I understand border security, but arresting a sick grandfather who has contributed for over 40 years doesn't solve anything,” Riggs stated.

Lafayette residents have reported an increase in ICE raids in Hispanic neighborhoods, generating terror in a community that, despite its social integration, continues to be treated as criminals.

Another outrageous case: deportation in Florida.

In parallel, another Cuban man, a resident of Florida for five years, was abruptly deported, leaving his wife and children behind. Writer Enrique Enrisco denounced the incident, emphasizing that the victim was a hard-working man of impeccable conduct. “Today I learned that a neighbor has been deported. He's from Placetas, a serious guy dedicated to his family,” he wrote.

The US persecutes migrants while funding media outlets to justify its blockade of Cuba.

These cases occur in a context where more than 539,400 Cubans are under ICE supervision, and 258,000 have open immigration proceedings. Cuba is the sixth country with the most migrants in this situation, behind nations like Mexico and Venezuela. While the US government spends millions on “Cuban-themed” media outlets—which distort the reality of the island and support the blockade—it persecutes and deports Cubans who have been contributing to their society for decades. The hypocrisy is evident: Where are “human rights” when families are separated and the elderly are deported? The Cuban community in the US demands justice and humanity, while Washington continues to implement a cruel and selective immigration policy, in line with its historical hostility toward Cuba.

Writer and university professor José Luis Méndez Méndez adds: "The arrival of Republican Donald J. Trump, the son of immigrants, to the White House for his second term and his excessive anti-immigrant policy has also dragged down Cubans who until now had been allies and pampered. It has uncovered and exacerbated the hatred of hundreds of island arrivals, who demand with visceral passion and endemic hatred the worst measures for their brothers and sisters, both in the United States and in Cuba."

"Parades of serial haters, who habitually live off resentment, shout "total suffocation," "no remittances," "no visas," "deportation now," "no food stamps," "shut down all flights to Cuba," "remove residency from those who remit or travel to see their relatives in Cuba," and they have even considered changing their birth blood, to become free of all past memories."

In short, there are multiple reports of cases of persecution and deportations of Cubans, which will increase as US immigration policy becomes more stringent.

On the other hand, on April 3, we were perplexed to hear the statements of the psychopath Mauricio Claver Carone, US special envoy for Latin America, when he admitted the harm caused to all Cubans here and there and asked for more support to inflict even more pain. This is a new level of cruelty and cynicism, an act of arrogance, cowardice, and total contempt for Cubans. This increases the persecution of Cubans, even if they have legal immigration documents.

So far, the persecution based on nationality has been directed toward Venezuelan and Cuban identity. Perhaps there are others that we haven't noticed.

"A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within."

Empires Fall from Within

Author: Raúl Zibechi: When the issue of tariffs gains widespread prominence, the hegemonic culture believes that it will be China that will succeed in defeating Donald Trump's United States, as it would be in a better economic, social, political, and technological position to supplant its hegemony, giving way to a multipolar world. The entire analysis focuses on Trump's personal characteristics and what China is doing to counter him. The people, the true protagonists, remain in the shadows.

The growing militarization of societies like the United States is the response to the rise of collective action, which is forcing the entire political spectrum to become increasingly far-right and make repression its main argument. Those at the top are very clear, because it is a constant in history, that empires fall from within, due to the active or passive resistance of the people.

 

“The closer the collapse of the Empire, the crazier its laws are.”- Marcus Tullious Cicero

A recent article in The Guardian, titled "US intensifies crackdown on peaceful protests under Trump," from April 9, addresses the issue with rigor. It is striking that it was written by Katharine Viner, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, something unusual and indicative of the importance given to the issue.

It begins by stating that in the first four months of this year, 41 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 22 states, compared to a total of 52 in 2024 and 26 in 2023, according to the International Center for Nonprofit Law's tracker. According to the author, these are criminal penalties against peaceful protests protected by the Constitution, targeting “college students, anti-war protesters, and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and heavy fines, a crackdown that experts warn threatens to erode First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and petition” (https://goo.su/QPKb9).

 

Had the Ottoman Empire been saved rather than sunk?

She also highlights the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy Act, which creates a new crime applicable to protests that disrupt planned or operating natural gas pipelines, “which would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for individuals or $500,000 for organizations.” This repressive legislation is a significant leap forward since the 2016 anti-pipeline protests in Standing Rock, North Dakota, led by Indigenous peoples.

The Guardian editor argues that the new provisions seek to “discourage people from speaking out, in addition to being incredibly repressive.” Lawmakers typically respond with more and more repressive bills whenever a movement takes to the streets. “In 2021, 92 bills were introduced in 35 states in response to the social uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

Jenna Leventoff of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argues that the raft of anti-protest laws “aim to scare people and discourage them from protesting, or worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.” Cited by Viner, David Armiak, research director at the Center for Media and Democracy, argues: “The sheer number and variety of anti-protest bills introduced in just three months, combined with the revocation of student visas and the disappearance of student protesters by the administration of the self-proclaimed ‘law and order president,’ indicates a move toward fascism.”

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, writing in the same outlet last Sunday, argue that “we must recognize that we are not facing familiar adversaries. We are facing end-times fascism.” In the article “The Rise of End-Times Fascism” (https://goo.su/2AN7T), they argue that these far-right movements “lack a credible vision for a hopeful future,” unlike classic fascism.

For those at the top, collapse is a kind of “regulation” of humanity. Trumpist Steve Bannon claims the world is going to hell because "the infidels are breaking through the walls of containment." That's why they're barricading themselves in bunkers and even dreaming of fleeing to Mars, like Elon Musk himself. That's what they're doing, militarizing, repressing, and building their worlds without the poor or people of the color of the earth.

Roman Empire Collapse

 If anyone can defeat the far right around the world, it won't be China. Just as we must understand that the far right sweeping the world is a reaction to the people's progress and the ongoing collapse, we must also accept that only the people and organized groups can stop them. Knowing that what they do is because they fear us should give us courage in such difficult times. We mustn't be distracted by looking to leaders.