Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
INDEPENDENT, investigative journalist and author, Antony Loewenstein has been a maverick player on the left-field of journalism for almost 15 years, reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict, repressive regimes, disaster capitalism and, most recently, the war on drugs.
His new book Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs takes a macro-political lens to subject, investigating both wealthy consumer countries such as the US and Britain and impoverished, transit and narco-states, such as Guinea-Bissau, Honduras and the Philippines.
I talked with Loewenstein on a long-distance Skype call to discuss the “war on drugs” — how it functions as a conduit for the US empire and how, at its rotten core, it’s all about “class, class, class …” Loewenstein also shared his views on the current coronavirus pandemic and how it’s in danger of being co-opted by the ever-watchful forces of disaster capitalism.
As Palestine Action prisoners go weeks without food, alleging dangerous neglect and detention without trial, campaigners warn that a near-total media blackout is hiding a crisis that could turn fatal – and fuel a growing wave of public anger. ELIZABETH SHORT reports
Colombia’s success in controlling the drug trade should be recognised and its sovereignty respected, argues Dr GLORY SAAVEDRA
Trump’s Gaza deal is a transient, self-aggrandising spectacle that barely distracts from the West’s outright complicity in the massacre in Gaza and our slide into warmongering, writes MATT KERR
HANK KENNEDY contends that US military attacks in the Caribbean amount to modern piracy driven by Venezuela’s oil wealth


