It is becoming increasingly hard, it seems, to have civil conversations. In an increasingly polarized political climate, families and friendships are being ruined by intense disagreements. According to a CBS News/YouGov poll, the majority of Americans now believe that their political adversaries pose the greatest threat to democracy and way of life. Many now dread…

GENEVA — Big pharmaceutical companies have not come out of COVID-19 looking like model global citizens. Pfizer has been accused of bullying South American governments after demanding they put up military bases as collateral in exchange for vaccines. Meanwhile, Bill Gates persuaded Oxford University to sign an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca for its new offering,…

BRUSSELS — It is really not going well in Europe. Nearly 900,000 people have died from COVID-19, a number of countries are facing new waves of the deadly virus, and Paris is going into a four-week lockdown starting tonight after a fresh spike in cases. Meanwhile, the European Union’s vaccine rollout has been particularly ponderous.…

WASHINGTON — A new report from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) boasts that, throughout 2020, it worked with other U.S. government agencies to combat the “malign influence” of Russia, Cuba and Venezuela in the Americas. The two examples it cites are “persuading Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine” and pushing Panama…

Welcome to MintCast — an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. I’m your host Mnar Muhawesh Adley. Within just three months in office amid a global pandemic, the Joe Biden administration recently ordered an airstrike that dropped 1.75 tons of explosives on a town in Syria near the Iraq border. The…

ARMONK, NEW YORK — IBM is partnering with Covid-19 mRNA vaccine maker Moderna to track vaccine administration in real time through its various blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and hybrid cloud services. According to a company press release, the collaboration will “focus on exploring the utility of IBM capabilities in the U.S.,” such as a recently unveiled…

 Welcome to MintCast — an interview series featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence — I’m your host, Mnar Adley. Today we’re joined by Raul Diego, a MintPress staff writer, filmmaker and photojournalist who will discuss the anti-Chinese lockdown propaganda and how the COVID economic disaster is paving the way for surveillance, digital…

LONDON — According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, an economy is “the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used.” For the last few centuries, this system has been dominated by the paradigm of capitalism, in which the private owners of capital, and not the state, control…

The worldwide Covid vaccine rollout has gone anything but smoothly, with only a handful of countries able to immunize even 10% of their populations yet with a first dose. Two primary causes of this have been rich nations hoarding precious doses and their refusal to waive the intellectual property rights to their creations, both of…

Saturday Night Live (SNL) has come in for a storm of criticism after airing a joke critical of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout policy. The show’s anchor Michael Che quipped that “Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population. And I’m going to guess it is the Jewish half.” Despite addressing the topic for…

Less than a month away from the one-year anniversary of the pandemic’s official declaration, policy wonks at the Atlantic Council together with former and current government officials are dissecting the “lessons” of the Covid-19 epidemic to advise the Biden administration on the steps to take in order to avert the next disaster. Following a report…

The seven-day average COVID death toll hit an all time high yesterday, with over 3,400 Americans expected to die on any given day. Educator cases are on the rise. Studies have shown that children are as likely to contract and pass the coronavirus on as adults, making schools potential super spreading hotspots. As a result,…