The Green Planet Monitor

GPM # 100 “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which includes mass killing, arbitrary detention, torture, and the imposition of a legal regime that provides far less due process than that provided to Israelis living in the same territory, meets the legal definition of apartheid.” So say four American human rights lawyers and scholars in a report released on May 15 , entitled “An Analysis of Israel...

GPM # 99 The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000. According to a pair of reports in the British medical journal The Lancet , the number may be much higher . Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000? Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US b...

GPM # 98 Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza has just entered its 21st month. According to Gaza health officials, almost 55,000 have been killed since the war began ( the actual number may be two or three times higher ), and 125,000 have been injured, with fewer and fewer places to seek care. Gaza’s health system — among the region’s most functional, before the war — has been laid to wa...

GPM # 97 Israel’s war on Gaza is about to enter its twentieth month. Widely described as genocidal by legal scholars and human rights experts, Israel and its conjoined twin (‘Israel-USA’) say it’s nothing of the sort. One would hardly expect genocide perpetrators to acknowledge committing the crime of crimes.  Israel’s ability to commit the highest of crimes with impunity —...

GPM # 96 A Conversation With Michael Lynk Nineteen months into Israel-USA’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, the official death toll now over 53,000 , likely much higher and climbing fast (approaching 200,000, some say ), two questions beg to be asked – how and why did it start, and why has it been so hard to stop? According to The Guardian , the Gaza war was “triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 20...

GPM # 95 Earth is in trouble . Alongside the collapse of its climate system , the unraveling of the planet’s living fabric poses a threat the human species may not survive — certainly not human ‘civilization’, such as it is. Earth’s biosphere is now in the throes of a mass extinction event rivaling anything the planet has experienced since life emerged, 3.8 billion years ag...

GPM # 94 Sex is complex (whether you’re XY or XX). So sang a Manitoba trio called the Welfare Starlets. This past week, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the distinction between XY and XX isn’t that complex at all. Under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act , the court declared , in a unanimous, landmark decision, the terms “woman” and “sex” refer exclusively to a biological woman and to biological sex – not...

GPM # 94 “The world as we know it is gone.” So wrote British Prime Minister Keir Starmer a few days ago, in a Sunday Telegraph opinion piece . Sound frightful? Take a close look. Sir Keir was contemplating the consequences of Donald Trump’s global on-again, off-again, on-again tariff war, now savaging financial markets from Wall Street to Taipei. The financial world, in Keir Starmer’s mind. The wo...

GPM # 92 Among the many theories about how planet Earth works, none are more fascinating than the role of complexity – the idea that, as human societies develop, they get increasingly complicated; tied together and dependent on connections and systems that defy comprehension, that endlessly proliferate and are liable to come undone, in self-amplifying cascades. Thomas Homer-Dixon has devoted his a...

GPM # 91 The Israeli military has directly targeted the women and girls of Gaza, committing acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder, and the war crime of wilful killing, a UN human rights report says. “More than a human can bear: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023,” the report is entitled. Released o...

GPM # 90 It’s every stuffy conservative Canadian politician or Zionist cheerleader’s most disagreeable moment – getting accosted by Yves Engler . Yves Engler is a prolific political commentator and writer, the author of thirteen books and countless articles about Canadian foreign policy and international affairs, through an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist lens. He’s also a master of guerilla-sty...

GPM # 89 Disciplinary Purgatory By David Kattenburg “A university is definitely not a democratic institution.” So said Columbia University’s Vice Dean of Graduate Faculties, Herbert Deane, back in April 1967, at the height of campus protests against America’s war on Vietnam. “Student or faculty opinion should not in itself have any influence on the formation of administrative policy,”...

GPM # 88 Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the city of Bethlehem, a half dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-colonial settlements, a biologist named Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and their friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits, fish, and hyenas, and offering up habit...

GPM # 87 Each year, fossil fuel burning sends 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere. A little over a tenth of those emissions – 4 billion tons – are associated with heating air and water in homes and buildings. So, clean ways to generate heat are in … hot demand. Low power pumps transfer heat from air to water, and air to air. Then there’s geothermal energy – piping hot water from...

GPM # 86 The first phase of a ceasefire is now underway in war-ravaged Gaza. The tiny enclave’s woe begotten people, now free to return home under the terms of the US/Qatari/Egyptian-brokered deal, are overjoyed. That joy is tempered by the enormous death toll they’ve suffered, and the horrific devastation before their eyes. Numbers speak volumes . When Israel’s assault began, fo...

GPM # 85 The issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former War Minister, Yoav Gallant, last November 21, descended like a lightning bolt on the two men, neither of whom figured they’d ever face justice for crimes they vehemently deny. Equally shaken up – some ready and willing to fulfill their duty to the world’s top criminal court; others reportedly...

GPM # 84 Some are cheering. It may be premature. On December 8, after almost 25 years of rule, and against all odds, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was deposed by a small army of Islamist rebels. Assad, a reportedly soft-spoken ophthalmologist, has taken refuge in Moscow. Assad’s ouster brings to an end 54 years of dynastic, authoritarian, and exceptionally brutal rule. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-...

GPM # 83 The issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former War Minister, Yoav Gallant, on November 21, descended like a lightning bolt on the two men, neither of whom figured they’d ever face justice for crimes they vehemently deny. Equally shaken up – some ready and willing to fulfill their duty to the world’s top criminal court; others hedging their...

GPM # 82 Eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay , Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York. Back in the mid-1970s, Glenn Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the...

GPM # 81 Of all the staunchly pro-Israel Western powers who mouth support for a ‘two-state’ solution to Israel’s ‘conflict’ with the Palestinian people, no one puts its money where its mouth isn’t more than Canada. Ottawa’s formal position appears straightforward, even just-minded. Canada “recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination,&#8221...

GPM # 80 Wanna destroy a people in whole or in part? In other words, commit genocide – as genocide is defined under international law? You don’t need gas chambers, firing squads, and deep ditches. Just destroy their schools and universities . Bomb their libraries, archives and cultural institutions; seize their historical records. Make it as hard as possible to go to their kids to go to school. Ac...

Annihilation Doctrine Over a year has passed since October 7, 2023 — the Palestinian/Israeli equivalent of 9-11. In the course of its vengeful response to the invasion of southern Israel by Gaza-based Palestinian resistance fighters, itself precipitated by 17 years of brutal Israeli siege, Israel occupation forces have killed at least 42,000 Gazans, 16,000 of them children. Palestinian casua...

GPM # 78 Bacteria are Earth’s most ancient creatures. And there are lots of them, with a total mass a thousand times more than all humans. Microbes — both prokaryotic and eukaryotic — make planet Earth go round. Some of them are dangerous pathogens. Most of them aren’t. Indeed, some bacteria are great kitchen companions. Anna Sigrithur has been harnessing microbial magic, ferment...

GPM # 77 This past September 11 – an indelibly dreadful date — thirty-four Palestinians were killed in a pair of Israeli airstrikes on a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza. Twelve-thousand were sheltering there at the time, most of them women and children. Among the casualties, six aid workers with the UN Relief & Works Agency, UNRWA . Founded in 1949, UNRWA provides hu...

GPM # 76 It’s a staggering statistic. Covid killed almost seven million worldwide. The number is likely higher. Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier pandemic sweeps the planet — Bacterial infections antibiotics can’t cure. According to one UK government study , by 2050, ten million may die annually, infected by multi or pan-resistant microbes no drug will kill. Drug resistance is the ineluctabl...