Arriving for my bone density test at a downstate New York hospital, I’m delighted to again find Belinda in Radiology. When she does my annual mammogram, I learn more than about cancer. Although she readily shares her own breast cancer experience as she prepares her half-million-dollar machine. How she delights in describing its new features. ...

Syria, Alas: Is There Reason for Optimism? We have a stingy agreement from most Arab League countries that Syria, one of its founding members, one of the area’s strongest Arab nationalist members, one whose policy has been the most uncompromising toward Israel, is readmitted to that capricious club. This assembly, however august, is hardly a ...

It was only when I started reading a collection of this remarkable African leader’s prison letters (records from 1962 to 1990) gathered in a judiciously edited 600-page book that I began to grasp the powerful character behind the freedom fighter, prisoner and South African president. Many of us have seen the films “Long Walk to ...

A London hospital removes Palestinian children’s art because it upset some patients. Meanwhile, seemingly unassociated, far away in The West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians men, women and children are being ‘removed’ from their homes through a daily sustained process of genocidal cleansing. So abundant are the grievances of Palestinians, so relentless the attacks on their ...

Menacing Winter Wonder. February 6, 2023 by BNimri Aziz Those images from the December blizzard engulfing Buffalo in upstate New York were shocking. Hard to grasp the reality. That ghostliness was not only from the icy, white shroud covering everything. There were also the deaths of citizens who ventured outside, or who simply couldn’t get ...

Commentators are busy speculating how the American president’s promise – endorsed by the country as enthusiastically as Zelensky himself– of M1 Abram tanks to Ukraine will affect the war that grinds on in Ukraine. Many assume that gifts of fighter jets will follow shortly. What disturbs me is the semantics of Biden’s announcement of the ...

Jacobin author Neal Meyer has pointed out what I too was thinking. The Left, indeed all of today’s Democrats, would do well to view as a lesson in politics, the successful far-right GOP strategy to bend House-Speaker-in-waiting McCarthy to their will. Liberal commentators watching the horse-trading on the House floor earlier this month, suggested their ...

Do Meghan and Harry Really Believe They Control the Narrative? by BNAziz Jan 6/2023 My sister in Canada once had an ardent although not excessive interest in British royalty. She's followed successive generations of The Windsors from the 1940s into the 21st Century. Now, she says, that’s over. First she refused to indulge the latest ...