In the interior of the Yucatán Peninsula, where jungle vegetation intertwines with the characteristic limestone of the region, a team of archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History has brought to light a settlement that completes the complex mosaic of the Maya civilization. This is K’oxol Ja’ II, an archaeological site made up […]
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug. 24, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The US military has resumed its campaign of bombing alleged drug-trafficking vessels after a two-month pause in a campaign that many legal experts and human rights groups believe constitutes a murder spree.
In a Monday social media post, US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said it carried out a “lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes” in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday. Two people were killed as a result of the attack, SOUTHCOM claimed.
In announcing the strike, SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis Donovan said the attack was part of a campaign of “imposing total systemic friction on narco-terrorists—disrupting their operations, dismantling their leadership, and eliminating cartel terror across the region.”
Donovan’s boasts about the effectiveness of the boat strikes in combating the drug trade come less than a month after a leaked a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) analysis revealed that the boat-bombing campaign has not “reduced the amount of cocaine entering” the country, as drug cartels have found alternate methods for shipping their product into the US.
With the latest two casualties, the boat bombing campaign launched nearly a year ago by President Donald Trump’s administration has now claimed the lives of at least 223 people.
Adam Isaacson, director of the Defense Oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), criticized the administration for resuming its boat bombings despite “overwhelming evidence that they are murder; that many, likely most, of the dead are either super-low-level or uninvolved with drugs; and that cocaine supply is unaffected.”
Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, delivered a similarly scathing assessment, commenting that “the Trump administration’s lawless killing spree at sea resumes.”
Nicholas Grossman, professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, described the boat strike campaign as “murderous” and “illegal,” adding that its victims are “not terrorists” and “may not even be drug traffickers.”
Investigative journalist Camila Lourdes Galarza observed that “there’s still no proof any of the victims” of the boat strikes were involved in the drug trade.
Lourdes Galarza sarcastically added that if the victims had been drug traffickers, “the US would probably give them a deal” like the one given to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was pardoned by Trump last year despite being previously convicted on narcotics trafficking charges.
More than a decade ago, a group of snipers shot up an electrical substation in Silicon Valley, striking power transformers and disabling the substation for nearly a month. The shooters were never identified; similar substation shootings, some by neo-Nazis, have taken place since. The longer Christopher Cox studies the American power grid—looking at aging infrastructure and ongoing transformer shortages, specialized manufacturing and rising demand, the massive energy consumption of data centers and whiplash usage of large language models—the more vulnerable it seems. “Somehow, we’ve made the industrial equivalent of a Fabergé egg the linchpin of our civilization,” Cox writes. “What would happen if someone started breaking them?”
The hope of restoring the grid would fade as fossil fuel supplies were exhausted, because so many utilities rely on them to “black-start” their generating units. A 2010 report called “High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System,” prepared by the Energy Department and NERC, condensed the entire disaster movie that would follow into a single paragraph: “The supply of food, water and fuel would degrade within days. The facile communication of information to the general population would be greatly complicated by the loss of cellphones, internet access and television. The economy would virtually shut down as electronic transactions could no longer be processed. After several days, widespread social unrest and confusion would ensue.” Thirsty, starved, dirty and surrounded by the useless machines we once depended on, we would be lucky if our misery ended at “confusion.”
La Casa Bianca parla apertamente di «prendere Cuba», e la stampa costruisce il fascicolo che dovrebbe giustificarlo. Mentre il Sud America viene scosso da un sisma devastante e la nuova Colombia riscrive in sette giorni la propria politica estera, l’America Latina entra in una fase senza precedenti, con lsraele che preme da una parte e gli USA che ripetono la solita vecchia strategia. Dal 9 gennaio a Cuba non arriva più petrolio. Metà del Paese resta al buio a intermittenza, gli ospedali razionano, gli aerei restano a terra. Dopo 60 anni di blocco, una vera e propria guerra economica e mediatica, non solo a Cuba ma in tutta l’America Latina. Ne parliamo con Gianmarco Pisa, analista geopolitico e ricercatore di pace dell’IPRI, Corpi Civili di Pace. Intervista a cura di Jeff Hoffman
Affrontiamo insieme: L’embargo energetico e i blackout: l’arma che non lascia crateri La fabbrica del consenso: come si prepara mediaticamente un’aggressione La Colombia di De la Espriella: Golan, Sahara Occidentale, basi statunitensi Il terremoto del Chocó e gli aiuti umanitari come strumento politico Che cosa può ancora fare un movimento per la pace in questo quadro
LIBRI DELL’OSPITE
Più eterno del bronzo. Educazione alla cultura e semantica del monumento,
Multimage, Firenze, 2026
Le porte dell’arte. I musei come luoghi della cultura, Multimage, 2024
La pagina in comune, Ad Est dell’Equatore, Napoli, 2015
Corpi Civili di Pace in Azione, Ad Est dell’Equatore, Napoli, 2013
SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV
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Circa millenovecento voli previsti su Catania, il trentasei per cento cancellati, oltre seicento dirottati. Migliaia di passeggeri accampati a Fontanarossa nella settimana di Ferragosto, autonoleggi rincarati, corse abusive a settecento euro per raggiungere Palermo. Ma perché gli USA e la NATO non vogliono più permettere che le piste di Sigonella vengano usate per voli civili? E’ successo in passato, perché adesso no? Qual è il reale costo delle basi USA e NATO in Italia? Cosa significa essere un protettorato durante una transizione globale? Nel frattempo, mentre al Pentagono discutono di attacchi nucleari all’Iran, cosa succede nel Kurdistan iracheno? Quali interessi protegge l’Esercito Italiano? Ne parliamo con Antonio Mazzeo, giornalista e ricercatore indipendente che da vent’anni documenta la militarizzazione del Mediterraneo. Intervista a cura di Jeff Hoffman
AFFRONTIAMO INSIEME
– Chi decide realmente sull’uso delle piste di Sigonella
– Servitù militari in Sicilia e in Italia: il conto complessivo
– Il Pentagono discute di un attacco nucleare all’Iran
– L’Iran attacca i curdi iracheni
– l’Esercito Italiano a servizio delle guerre imperialiste
L’ARTICOLO DI RIFERIMENTO
Antonio Mazzeo, «CONSIDERAZIONI. Eruzioni Etna. Perché USA e NATO non mollano Sigonella», Scomunicando, agosto 2026.
I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN
BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese e russo)
SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV
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This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Adriana Abdenur, a Brazilian policy expert and co-president of the Global Fund for a New Economy, and Jorge Castañeda, former foreign minister of Mexico and professor at Sciences Po, to explore debates about development and ideas of strategic autonomy across Latin America.
Jorge explains why China’s role is varied across the region, arguing that Mexico and much of Central America remain deeply constrained by their economic ties to the US. Adriana discusses Brazil’s long tradition of strategic autonomy, describing how policymakers engage with China as both an economic partner and a source of ideas on development, technology and global governance.
Together, Mark, Adriana and Jorge explore how intensifying US-China competition is reshaping the region’s choices. Can Latin American countries balance relations with both powers? Is China a model, a market or simply another partner in a multipolar world? And what does strategic autonomy look like in an increasingly coercive geopolitical environment?
This podcast episode was recorded on July 31st 2026.
The peg for Robert Zaretsky’s essay on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot feels flimsy: “the 70th anniversary of its American premiere,” which lagged the show’s proper premiere, in Paris, by three years. Disregard the peg; as Zaretsky makes clear, there’s not a bad time, these days, to consider Beckett’s best-known work, a demonstration of “solidarity and compassion” set against a “featureless, colorless vista.” The stage directions for Godot have Estragon, one of the play’s leads, look out into the auditorium as an extension of the devastation. “Inspiring prospects,” he says. Let’s hope so.
Of course, Godot never arrives. In a Sesame Street parody of the play, the tree, fed up with the melodramatic and nonsensical patter of two Muppets waiting for Elmo, uproots itself and walks off the stage. But we cannot uproot ourselves and walk off the stage; instead, stuck like Didi and Gogo in a state of non-arrival, we wait. For those who waited for an answer from Beckett, none ever came. He once snapped at the English actor Ralph Richardson, who asked if Godot stood for God. If he had meant God, Beckett said, he would have written God. The play, he insisted, strove to avoid definition. This strategy of avoidance leaves us to gaze at a landscape void of meaning, one that by turns is the source of our bemusement and amusement.
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