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On April 1, a mural appeared in the Southern Italian city of Naples, depicting Palestinian workers lining at an Israeli military checkpoint near the occupied city of Bethlehem, in the West Bank. It is called ‘Welcome to Bethlehem’.

The mural, which quickly became popular in the town and on social media, was the work of a well-known Italian artist and photographer, Eduardo Castaldo.

Castaldo, who is a cinematic and television photographer, is not your typical artist, as he dedicates part of his time and efforts to championing struggles for human rights, equality and justice, especially in Palestine and throughout the Middle East.  

Just in case you haven’t had enough of those “Masterpiece Theater” type of prestigious, polished, Brit productions, the British Film Institute has launched a ​subscription video on demand collection of more than 200 of the top UK movies for buffs across the pond in the colonies. BFI Player Classics offers the cream of the crop across genres, ranging from thrillers to comedies to horror to sci fi to documentaries and beyond.

The movies are categorized as “Collections,” including “Alfred Hitchcock,” which focuses on the England-born Master of Suspense’s oeuvre before he relocated to Hollywood, such as Hitch’s 1930 whodunit Murder! “Ealing Comedies” features flicks from that eponymous studio known for its humor-laced output, some starring Alec Guinness before he used the “force” in Star Wars, in 1949’s Kind Hearts & Coronets and 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob. The “British Classics” Collection includes Carol Reed’s 1949 postwar film noir piece de resistance The Third Man, with a cynical Orson Welles portraying the titular underworld mastermind. Interestingly, none of the 200-plus offerings include screen adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Tiny Palau invited the Pentagon to build ports,
bases and airfields on its Pacific islands, after Chinese President Xi
Jinping bullied Palau by destabilizing its fragile economy, according
to defiant President Surangel Whipps.

"President Whipps' frank assessment of Chinese pressure -- and
invitation to host U.S. bases -- are unusually blunt for a Pacific
leader," Australia Pacific Security College Director Meg Keen said in
an interview.

There is a "high-stakes rivalry going on," between China and the U.S.,
said Ms. Keen.

"Pacific nations may have small populations and landmass, but should
be seen as 'large ocean states' intimately connected to other island
nations of the 'Blue continent'.

"China is wanting to bring as many Pacific nations into their Belt and
Road network as possible, so it has access across the Pacific to the
Americas and Antarctica," she said.

Pacific island nations could be exploited by either side if hostile
military action erupts between Beijing and Washington, analysts said.

There are two separate Sheikh Jarrah stories—one read and watched in the news and another that receives little media coverage or due analysis.

The obvious story is that of the nightly raids and violence meted out by Israeli police and Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the devastated East Jerusalem neighborhood.

For weeks, thousands of Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinian communities in Jerusalem's Old City. Their objective is the removal of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. They are not acting alone. Their riots and rampages are directed by a well-coordinated leadership composed of extremist Zionist and Jewish groups, such as the Otzma Yehudit party and the Lehava Movement. Their unfounded claims, violent actions and abhorrent chant "Death to the Arabs" are validated by Israeli politicians, such as Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Arieh King.

It’s the job of progressive advocates and activists to tell inconvenient truths, without sugarcoating or cheerleading. To effectively confront the enormous problems facing our country and world, progressives need to soberly assess everything -- good, bad and mixed.

Yet last week, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, made headlines when she graded President Biden’s job performance. “I give him an ‘A’ so far,” Jayapal said in an otherwise well-grounded interview with the Washington Post. She conferred the top grade on Biden even though, as she noted, “that doesn’t mean that I agree with him on every single thing.”

There has been virtually no American media coverage of last week’s arrival of a senior Israeli delegation in Washington to discuss Iran. The delegation included the head of the Israeli external intelligence service Mossad Yossi Cohen and Israel’s National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat. Their itinerary included briefings at the Pentagon and also with national security and State Department officials at the White House.

America is not a racist country,” Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said in his party’s official response to President Biden’s address to the nation on April 28. There are reasons that should have been a laugh line: Biden did not say America was a “racist country,” the Black senator was rebutting the president’s call for racial justice across all ethnicities, and the reality is that America was founded as a country in which owning and selling Black people was justified and legalized on the basis of the racist doctrine that they were part of an inferior race. Scott didn’t get a laugh. He wasn’t trying to be funny. He was being intellectually dishonest and uttering a coded racist call to the white supremacist cohort of the Republican party that he is tolerant of their different, racist point of view. That’s where denial takes you, into crazy-land.

The decision on April 30 by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to ‘postpone’ Palestinian elections, which would have been the first in 15 years, will deepen Palestinian division and could, potentially, signal the collapse of the Fatah Movement, at least in its current form. 

British director Paul Tanter’s droll Stealing Chaplin may be a comedy that will keep audiences laughing from beginning to end, but the other movie it reminds me of is screenwriter Kemp Powers’ One Night in Miami. Although the latter is a heavy-hitting drama, the fanciful stories of both Miami and Stealing are loosely inspired by real life events. In the case of the former, following his 1964 championship bout with Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali really did spend much of the rest of the evening with Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a Miami motel room. Little is known of what those titans said and did that evening, but this actual, historic incident kindled Powers’ powers of imagination to conjure up what may have come to pass, which was dramatized onstage by L.A.’s Rogue Machine in 2013 and onscreen last year.

This year’s annual update to World BEYOND War’s Mapping Militarism project uses a completely new mapping system developed by our Technology Director Marc Eliot Stein. We think it does a better job than ever of displaying the data of warmaking and peacemaking on maps of the world. And it makes use of new data reporting on the latest trends.

When you visit the Mapping Militarism site, you will find seven sections linked across the top, most of which contain multiple maps listed down the lefthand side. Each map’s data can be seen in map view or list view, and the data in list view can be ordered by any column you click on. Most of the maps/lists have data for a number of years, and you can scroll back through the past to see what’s changed. Every map includes a link to the source of the data.

The maps included are as follows: