For 26 years Consortium News has depended on the support of our loyal readers. Here’s what we do with your contributions.
August 2020: We published 15 articles on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki exploring scholarship showing how unnecessary the bombings were.
September 2020: This month was dominated by our daily coverage of the extradition hearing of Julian Assange. Consortium News had remote video access to the courtroom at Old Bailey in London and observed every minute of the three-week long hearing. It provided the basis for live updates everyday, live tweeting, a comprehensive report after each day in court, a live video recap nightly of developments in the case and CN Live! special webcasts each weekend of the case.
November 2020: Our webcast CN Live! presented the program “War Crimes” with Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Four Corners’ journalist Peter Cronau and (ret.) U.S. Col. Ann Wright, who discussed the Brereton Report on war crimes in Afghanistan by Australia’s Special Forces as well as the long history of impunity of U.S. war crimes. We also ran a related article on the war crimes investigation.
Diana Johnstone, our Paris correspondent, wrote an article on the “Great Reset” taking advantage of crises like the pandemic to ram through a chilling new economic and social model for the world. In November Consortium News also provided extensive coverage of the 2020 U.S. election, including in print and a pre-election webcast with Jill Stein, Chris Hedges, Mike Gravel and economist Rick Wolff, plus live, election night coverage on CN Live!
On Nov. 15, Consortium News celebrated 25 years in existence, as the first independent, online news site in the United States. Film director Oliver Stone was among the guests to mark our anniversary on a special edition of CN Live!
December 2020: We introduced our India correspondent, Betwa Sharma, with her first dispatch from Delhi. Sharma has reported from India for The New York Times.
We ran this piece on the odd way a new U.S. president picks a cabinet, this one on democracy as a struggle, not a fact, and a piece on how the Taliban got rich.
January 2021: The month began with our reporting on the decision in the Julian Assange extradition case, including a discussion on CN Live! with Roger Waters and John Pilger; on Donald Trump’s last day in office, we assessed the 10 Worst Things Trump Did & 5 Things He Didn’t Do (with illustrations from a 14-year old in Sydney, Australia); Columnist Patrick Lawerence gave his assessment of the new secretary of state; our Middle East columnist As’ad AbuKhalil wrote on the Machinations in the Gulf; the editor weighed in on the persistence of Russiagate and on the 27th we marked the third anniversary of the death of our founder, Bob Parry.
February 2021: YouTube permanently took down an episode of CN Live! in a textbook example of out-of-control algorithms trying to police speech. Journalist Greg Palast was our guest to speak about his new documentary on voter suppression in the Georgia run-off election. At its start there is a one-minute clip of Trump supporters protesting the presidential election result as voter fraud. It was a piece of reportage that the rest of the documentary debunked.
The algorithm did not know the difference between voter fraud and voter suppression. More troubling our appeal explaining this difference and pointing out that reporting a small part of the program doesn’t signal endorsement was rejected and CN Live! was suspended for a week.
This month we also reported on the crisis in Scottish politics related to the Craig Murray case and columnist John Kiriakou warned against an extreme reaction to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.
And 10 years after the Egyptian uprising, CN columnist As’ad AbuKhalil assessed its meaning.
Support CN’s Winter Fund Drive
March 2021: In “Russiagate Rolls On, Giving Biden Political Cover,” published on March 20, Joe Lauria wrote this about the new U.S. intelligence assessment: “U.S. intelligence agencies cover-up U.S. activities abroad by attacking legitimate and independent domestic criticism by smearing it with a false association with a hostile foreign power. … Blaming Russia for just about anything that goes wrong in the U.S. has proved too useful to discard.”
This month Jim Di Eugenio reviewed two new films for CN with the theme: “MLK & Fred Hampton Versus J Edgar Hoover.”
April 2021: In “Dilemmas of the Muslim Brotherhood,” CN columnist As`ad AbuKhalil described the context in which the leadership of the Brotherhood began holding secret talks with Iran and its allies. We also looked back on the 10th anniversary of the Arab uprisings in this CN Live! Edition.
On April 11, the second anniversary of the arrest of Julian Assange, Consortium News published an in-depth history of both the Espionage Act and the British Official Secrets Act by Joe Lauria showing how their parallel developments came to ensnare the WikiLeaks publisher and how his indictment has turned the U.S. espionage law into an Official Secrets Act.
May 2021: On May Day, we republished an article written 50 years ago by Bob Parry for his college newspaper about his participation and arrest during the massive, non-violent civil disobedience on May Day 1971 in Washington in opposition to the Vietnam War.
We covered the trial of former British diplomat and blogger Craig Murray, who was imprisoned for eight months for his coverage of the trial of the former first minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond.
With an Israeli military operation against Gaza underway, we republished an article from CN‘s archives about the one scenario that might lead Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.
We also ran an original five-part series “A People’s Guide to the War Industry”
June 2021: We organized 11 members of the Australian parliament who support Julian Assange to make a joint video statement.
During a planned 8-part series Revealing the Pentagon Papers in Congress, about how Mike Gravel put the Papers into the Congressional Record 50 years ago in this month, we lost Sen. Gravel. Mike was a member of our board and a friend of many years. We ran this obituary, “What Mike Gravel Meant”
July 2021: On the anniversary of his death, we published for the first time an interview Joe Lauria conducted with Gore Vidal in 2007.
YouTube lifted its ban on Consortium News and our first CN Live! back was with John Pilger and Ilan Pappé 20 years later to discuss Pilger’s film Palestine is Still the Issue, which we showed in its entirety.
Support CN’s Winter Fund Drive
We also focused on why the crumbling computer charge against Julian Assange is so vital to the U.S. case, in an article by Cathy Vogan. CN Live! looked at revelations that a key U.S. witness in the Assange case confessed to lying to the F.B.I. Guests included the present WikiLeaks editor-in-chief and a former Icelandic interior minister. This month we also unravelled the latest Russiagate saga.
Still from John Pilger’s film Palestine is Still the Issue, which was aired on CN Live!
August 2021: We reported on the way the corporate media buried a story about how the U.S. military may have fired on civilians at Kabul airport.
CN Live! looked at “Afghanistan: The 20-Year Disaster;” We looked back at the WikiLeaks revelations that exposed the real Afghan war; our Middle East columnist reviewed an important new book on Edward Said; and our legal analyst and London correspondent Alexander Mercouris explained troubling planned reforms for the British Official Secrets Act.
September 2021: To mark the 60th anniversary of the death of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold we ran four articles on Sept. 18, the day he was killed under suspicious circumstances in a plane crash in then Northern Rhodesia:
Likely Assassination of UN Chief by US, British and South African Intelligence Happened 60 Years Ago on Saturday; The Less-Cold Case of Dag Hammarskjöld; The Elusive Truth About the Death of Dag Hammarskjöld and My Father, and Who was Dag Hammarskjöld?
CN‘s editor-in-chief, who was a correspondent at U.N. Headquarters for a quarter century for The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, assessed Joe Biden’s first address as president to the General Assembly.
October 2021: We were again able to get into the courtroom at the High Court in London via a video-link to watch every minute of the U.S. appeal against the order not to extradite Julian Assange to the United States and filed the following morning and afternoon news reports during the two-day hearing:
DAY ONE: US Lays Out Appeal Against Assange Judgement; ; DAY ONE: Assange Lawyer in Fiery Rebuttal at Day’s Conclusion; DAY TWO: Assange Lawyer Presses Parallels With Love Case; DAY TWO — ‘CIA Tried to Kill Assange;’ US: ‘He’s Only Moderately Depressed & Won’t Go to Isolation’;
As well as these webcasts: WATCH: CN Video Report Assange Hearing Day One; WATCH: CN Live! — ‘Assange: Malingerer or Martyr?’
We have provided the most comprehensive and thorough reporting, analysis, commentary and video of the Assange case of any media organization in the world because we recognize its First Amendment implications.
November 2021: As’ad AbuKhalil wrote this analysis of Aljazeera at its 25th anniversary; columnist Patrick Lawrence warned of the growing tensions over Ukraine and Taiwan and we published 22 articles on the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow.
This month we celebrated our 26th anniversary as the oldest, independent news site in the United States.
High Court Allows Assange Extradition, Quashing His Discharge
December 2021: We again had video access to the High Court to hear the judgment in the U.S. appeal of the Assange case. We published several original articles on the decision, including:
High Court Allows Assange Extradition, Quashing His Discharge; Democracy Dying in the Darkness of the Assange Case; Would Assange’s Stroke Have Mattered to the High Court?
And two videos: The High Court Decides and The Survival of Julian Assange .
This month we also published a piece from our Paris correspondent on Franco-German relations and from our Mideast columnist on Macron’s Treacherous Role in Lebanon.
Support CN’s
Winter Fund Drive
Donate securely with PayPal
Or securely by credit card or check by clicking the red button:
Yes, keep up the good work! I have just read Diana Johnstones’ article that you mention above, about Claus Schwab and the so called ‘Great Reset’. Somehow I missed this at the time. This reminds me of a novel I first read in the early nineties: ‘Journal of a Flood Year’ by David Ely. So much of what is happening today reminds of this rather prescient story; social distancing taken to the extreme; so called ‘intelligent ‘ machines and robots controlling our lives; a world of little human contact. World events constantly remind me of this book. I reccomend it!
Thank you CN!
Thank you for such a great job
September 2020: This month was dominated by our daily coverage of the extradition hearing of Julian Assange. Consortium News had remote video access to the courtroom at Old Bailey in London and observed every minute of the three-week long hearing. It provided the basis for live updates everyday, live tweeting, a comprehensive report after each day in court, a live video recap nightly of developments in the case and CN Live! special webcasts each weekend of the case.