Top World News

Mar 2, 2026 - World

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. Truth and Consequence, being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.The book’s subtitle — offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” — could hardly be more timely.Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.At the center of Truth and Consequence are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me … to shake hands with me … to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing — sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence — and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power — those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders – or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.” Daniel Ellsberg in 2002. Picture: Christopher Michel/Wiki Commons.1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence — from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.

Mar 2, 2026 - World

The Trump administration was expected to move forward with continued strikes in Iran regardless of how Americans feel about it, a New York Times reporter said Monday. In his first comments since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran this weekend, President Donald Trump signaled Monday that the campaign was progressing, said Tyler Pager, White House correspondent for the New York Times, during a live broadcast with CNN anchor Dana Bash. Trump's comments come as a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS revealed that 59% of Americans do not approve of the strikes in Iran and anticipate a long-term conflict in the region. "Most say they lack trust in Trump to make the right decisions about US use of force in Iran, with 60% saying they do not think he has a clear plan for handling the situation and 62% saying he should get congressional approval for any further military action," CNN reported."I think the White House will largely ignore some of this data," Pager said. "But I think one of the things that we just saw is the president has clearly struggled to outline clear objectives for what he is doing and what measures of success are and how long this is going to go as Kristen [Holmes] said, this is the first time we're hearing from the president in a live setting," Pager explained. "And I think there's a lot of Americans who woke up Saturday surprised by this operation, surprised that this could go on for weeks and have a lot of questions about what we're trying to do here and how will Americans know when it ends, and I think the president did not provide a lot of clarity there about what the length of this operation looks like."Trump suggested Monday that the conflict could last four to five weeks, or possibly longer. "And he also is saying that American troops may be on the ground," Pager said. "The one thing that I spoke to a lot of the president's most ardent supporters over the weekend and they are giving him a long leash, the MAGA base, there's obviously some high-profile, vocal opponents Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but a lot of the rank and file are giving the president some space to operate here, and we'll see how long that lasts."

Mar 2, 2026 - World

Iran is routinely called the most zealous sponsor of terrorism, both in the Middle East and throughout the world for good reason.

Mar 2, 2026 - World

Former Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan did not appear in court as he was in a Geneva hospital, according to lawyersThe prominent Swiss academic and Islam scholar Tariq Ramadan has not appeared in court for the first day of his trial in Paris on charges of raping three women in France between 2009 and 2016.The head judge in the case adjourned proceedings until Wednesday and ordered a medical report on Ramadan’s health, after his lawyers said he was in hospital in Geneva because of his multiple sclerosis. Continue reading...

Mar 2, 2026 - World

Top Trump administration officials pushed back Monday on the notion that the U.S. is rapidly being dragged into another endless war in the Middle East, even as the conflict with Iran widened, the American death toll rose to six, and President Trump predicted the fighting could last at least another month.