Fleshing out the animal world

A new exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum features more than 100 ‘skinned’ animals – from a balancing giraffe to a blood-red shark.   “Ouah! Qu-est-ce que c’est que ca?!” A group of French high…

In Palestine: Dying for Justice

On March 20, Hana’s 34th hunger strike day began. The previous day, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) said she’s in imminent danger of dying.  After examining her, its doctor “determined that she must be hospitalized…

Brian Willson: THE PRETEND SOCIETY

I was once a young man, very much like the young men and women who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan as US military soldiers. I grew up believing in the red, white and blue. I believed that the United States had a sacred mission to spread democracy around the world. Viet Nam was my generation’s war. I did not volunteer, but when I was drafted, I answered the call. It was in Viet Nam that my journey toward a different kind of knowledge began. One hot sunny morning in April 1969 I found myself in a small Mekong Vietnamese fishing village that had just been bombed, burned bodies lying everywhere. My job in that moment was to assess the success of bombing missions of so-called military targets. In my naivete, it never occurred to me that the countless targets, systematically being bombed, were undefended, inhabited rice farming and fishing villages. In effect, all that mattered was the creation of “enemy” body counts – lots of them – Washington’s demonic criteria for defining “success.”