Counterpunch

How did a term, once used accurately to describe the most virulent evil, become a charge flung at the mildest critic of Israel, particularly concerning its atrocious treatment of Palestinians? Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, the print and online journal CounterPunch has become a must read for hundreds of thousands a month who no longer believe anything they read in the mainstream press beyond the sports scores. On the subject of Israel and Palestine, the Israeli lobby in the U.S., the current Middle East crisis, and its ramifications at home and abroad, CounterPunch has been unrivaled. Herein, you'll find CounterPunch's most compelling reporting and commentary on this topic. Contributors include: former U.S. Representative -Cynthia McKinney, famed British foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, former senior CIA analysts Bill and Kathy Christison, the trenchant and witty philosopher Michael Neumann, seasoned Capitol Hill staffer "George Sutherland," Norman Finkelstein, the leading Israeli dissident Yuri Avneri, Shaheed Alam (who became a target of the fanatical Daniel Pipes), and Israeli journalists Neve Gordon and Yigal Bronner. In addition are: Will Yeoman's path-breaking essay on Israel and divestment, Kurt Nimmo on the hysterical attacks on AmiriBaraka for his poem on 9-11, Anne Pettifer's Zionism Unbound, Jeffrey St. Clair on the (Israeli) attack on the USS Liberty and the suppression of the investigation, and Alexander Cockburn's caustic and lighthearted memoir of his own experiences of being attacked as an anti-Semite, consequent upon his criticisms of Israel. This first book in the new CounterPunch series is a timely anthology on the compulsion of silence and complicity in crimes against a betrayed people. Nationally syndicated journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have co-authored numerous bestsellers, including Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs And The Press, Washington Babylon and Al Gore: A User's Manual.

Our climate is changing fast. The future is uncertain, probably fiery, and likely terrifying. Yet shifting weather patterns have threatened humans before, right here in North America, when people first colonized this continent. About 15,000 years ago, the weather began to warm, melting the huge glaciers of the Late Pleistocene. In this brand new landscape, humans managed to adapt to unfamiliar habitats and dangerous creatures in the midst of a wildly fluctuating climate. What was it like to live with huge pack-hunting lions, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, and gigantic short-faced bears, to hunt now extinct horses, camels, and mammoth? Are there lessons for modern people lingering along this ancient trail?The shifting weather patterns of today--what we call "global warming"--will far exceed anything our ancestors previously faced. Doug Peacock's latest narrative explores the full circle of climate change, from the death of the megafauna to the depletion of the ozone, in a deeply personal story that takes readers from Peacock's participation in an archeological dig for early Clovis remains in Livingston, MT, near his home, to the death of the local whitebark pine trees in the same region, as a result of changes in the migration pattern of pine beetles with the warming seasons.

The world as we know it is undergoing a sudden and violent transformation, unlike anything the planet has experienced since the Cretaceous Extinction. The evidence is all around us: vast droughts that last decades, super-storms and floods that destroy cities, dwindling aquifers, vanishing glaciers, toxic water supplies, raging wildfires, obscure new diseases, vanishing species and indigenous communities. Our planet is changing faster than evolution can keep up. The forces driving this radical transformation are not natural. The earth has been brought to the brink by a greed-based predatory economic system that chews up anything in its path and spits it out to the bitter end. Environmental journalists Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank take you on a sobering field trip through the danger zones; from the strip mines of Appalachia to last refuge of the grizzly, from the dirty fracking fields to the world's most dangerous place, the Hanford Nuclear Site in the Pacific Northwest. The Big Heat charts the battle lines for the future of the planet, from corporate villains to corrupt politicians and the fearless environmentalists who are standing up against the pillaging. This is an unflinching chronicle of the last fight that really matters.

Taking the reader deep inside of the circus, the zoo, and similar operations, Fear of the Animal Planet provides a window into animal behavior: chimpanzees escape, elephants attack, orcas demand more food, and tigers refuse to perform. Indeed, these animals are rebelling with intent and purpose. They become true heroes and our understanding of them will never be the same.

The ongoing battle for hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan is a military strategy inspired originally by efforts at domestic social control and counterinsurgency in the United States. Weaponizing Anthropology documents how anthropological knowledge and ethnographic methods are harnessed by military and intelligence agencies in post-9/11 America to placate hostile foreign populations. David H. Price outlines the ethical implications of appropriating this traditional academic discourse for use by embedded, militarized research teams. Price's inquiry into past relationships between anthropologists and the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon provides the historical base for this expose of the current abuses of anthropology by military and intelligence agencies. Weaponizing Anthropology explores the ways that recent shifts in funding sources for university students threaten academic freedom, as new secretive CIA-linked fellowship programs rapidly infiltrate American university campuses. Price examines the specific uses of anthropological knowledge in military doctrine that have appeared in a new generation of counterinsurgency manuals and paramilitary social science units like the Human Terrain Teams.