A new graphic novel brings to life the courtroom drama of the court-martial of Private Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking thousands of diplomatic cables and military reports to WikiLeaks in the biggest breach of classified materials in American history.

The trial was characterized by secrecy, and media outlets were denied access to rulings and motions associated with the case. For the novel, The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning, artist Clark Stoeckley sketched scenes in real time from inside the courtroom. His illustrations are paired with excerpts from court transcripts, which follow the argument as it unfolds between the prosecution and defense.

Read more and see the full excerpt at Newsweek.

As a result of a long-term illness (multiple myeloma), visits to Barts and the Royal London hospitals have been part of my regular routine for some years. I never cease to marvel at the range of responsibilities involved in keeping me alive and alleviating my aches and pains.

Nurses, technicians, receptionists, porters, admin and clerical workers, cleaners, pharmacists, phlebotomists, pathologists, doctors, and others all in their different ways perform essential tasks. If any of them drops the ball, patients’ wellbeing can be compromised, sometimes fatally.

Sitting in the day unit at Barts with my IV drip and reading the newspapers, I can’t help but compare this weight of responsibility, and the diligence with which it is discharged in the vast majority of cases, to the wanton irresponsibility of bonus-primed bankers, asset-stripping corporate executives and our whole tax-avoiding elite. And I do wonder how it is that more people are not sickened by the perversity of our system of rewards.

Read the full op-ed at the Guardian.

Native-born Americans and many immigrants are socialized by the myth of a meritocratic society, and that belief has some undeniable impact on their perceptions. But a cursory look at the dismal statistics regarding social mobility would show this to be pure fiction. Among the major developed countries, only in Italy and the United Kingdom is there less economic mobility. So, too, the much-scrutinized evidence about the yawning income gap opened up by the infamous 1% have lent credence to the more sober reality that the U.S. is a functional creditocracy, whose elites increasingly form an oligarchic creditor class, enriched by unearned income from economic rents.

Read the full discussion at Guernica.

A number of students [from the Oxford Union], led by Barnaby Raine, 19, arranged for Wadham College to host a debate with speakers originally scheduled to attend the Union.

The speakers included Norman Finkelstein, the leading scholar on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Palestinian journalist Mouin Rabbani.

Read the full article at the Daily Mail.

Clark Stoeckley’s graphic account from inside the Chelsea Manning trial is released today, marking its first anniversary. We exclusively excerpt Chelsea Manning’s testimony on her treatment in prison. Content warning: state violence, discussion of suicide.

Read the full excerpt at openDemocracy.

On today’s Free Speech Zone, Alyona discusses Clark Stoeckley’s new book “The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning,” the reality of “Stop and Frisk” in Florida, the White House delays plans to enlist young immigrants and more.

Watch the full interview at HuffPost Live.

We live in a society where the majority of people are up to neck in debt. And contrary to what we are told, the big banks want to keep it that way, according to Andrew Ross. Ross is professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. He is also a social activist who participated in Occupy Wall Street. He speaks with Redeye host Lorraine Chisholm.

Listen to the full podcast at Redeye Collective.

En Mami se presentó el libro en inglés “Antología de Narradores Cubanos” su autor es el escritor y fotógrafo Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, quien indicó que recopiló once textos de jóvenes narradores cubanos que han experimentado la censura, la tecnología y el desencanto ideológico.

See the full report here (in Spanish) and view photos here, from Martí Noticias.

El escritor y bloguero cubano Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo presentó en Books & Books de Coral Gables y en colaboración con el Cuban Research Institute de la Florida International University, la antología Cuba in Splinters. Eleven Stories from the New Cuba, publicada en inglés por la editorial O/R Books, y que recoge once cuentos de escritores habaneros, traducidos por Hillary Gulley.

See the full review at Dominicana en Miami.

To paraphrase a recent online comment on a post lamenting the collapse of contemporary book publishing—we don’t need another essay lamenting the collapse of contemporary publishing. Similarly, we don’t need another “publishing school” appended to a grad school’s extant courses in English or journalism. Or do we?

Read the full article at the Journal for Electronic Publishing.

Last year our own Michael Ratner made many trips to Fort Meade to attend the very secretive Private Chelsea Manning trials. Michael had also explained in past shows about how he heard Chelsea testify as to why he released each set of documents such as the Iraq war logs, the Afghanistan war logs, State Department cables and more. She said her decision to release the documents were done as an act of conscience. Our guest Wikileaks activist and artist Clark Stoeckley was also at this historic trial. His recent graphic novel titled The United States vs. Private Chelsea Manning is a collection of his vivid sketches from inside the court room. He joins us to talk about his work as an activist and his experiences producing the book. Welcome to Law and Disorder.

Listen to the full interview at Law and Disorder.

Ante el criterio de algunos cubanólogos, politólogos, historiadores y analistas del caso cubano de toda índole que consideran que uno de los legados del castrismo en la isla es la desconfianza entre los cubanos, Orlando Luis Pardo tiene un criterio diferente.

“El castrismo fue, ante todo, un enfermizo exceso de confianza”, dice el bloguero disidente, en entrevista vía email con el Nuevo Herald. Y es difícil contradecirlo cuando se piensa en las consecuencias de esos letreros que los cubanos pusieron hace cinco décadas a la puerta de su hogares y que rezaban: “Esta es tu casa, Fidel”.

Read more at el Nuevo Herald.

El escritor y bloguero cubano Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo presentará en Miami la antología Cuba in Splinters. Eleven Stories from the New Cuba, publicada en inglés por la editorial O/R Books.

El volumen, editado por Pardo Lazo, quien también figura como autor, recoge cuentos de Jorge Alberto Aguiar Díaz, Jorge Enrique Lage, Jhortensia Espineta, Ahmel Echevarría Peré, Lien Carrazana Lau, Polina Martínez Shviétsova, Michel Encinosa Fú, Lía Villares, Erick J. Mota y Raúl Flores.

To learn more, visit Diario de Cuba.

Reading succinct verbiage from unofficial transcript provided in Clark Stoeckley’s essential work, The United States Vs. Pvt. Chelsea Manning, I was struck by the extraordinary violence encapsulated in this grotesquely disproportional, premeditated sentence uttered in the service of empire. Several months later the very same words, with only some minor adjustments, would be uttered by Loretta A. Preska, Chief Judge in the case of another political prisoner; Jeremy Hammond.

Read the full article at ROAR Magazine.

University of Calgary professor Tom Keenan says while we should be very concerned about software like BlackShades that can spy on us on our computers there are things that we can do to protect ourselves.

To listen to the interview, visit CBC.

While just a few of our national political leaders — such as Rep. Karen Bass and Sen. Elizabeth Warren — have spoken out on the issue of student loan debt, and none of our leaders in higher education have said much of anything, grassroots activists have taken the lead. This should not be a surprise — it’s always been the case that change is driven by the people, not by their reputed leaders.

If we the people have been forced to bail out the banks, why can’t we exert our political will to demand that Congress and the President to do the same for students who are required to repay their student loans in the midst of what seems to be a perennially sluggish job market? In a horrible irony, the very banks we bailed out reaped profits from student loans, and now it is the federal government that is profiting, even as unemployment benefits have been cut.

Read the full article at The Huffington Post.

When diagnosed with cancer in 2007, Mike Marqusee was determined not to write about it. We should be thankful that he has done so, because on this much covered subject, he has many original things to say.

Politicians talk about waging a “war on cancer”, and finding a cure has featured in many electioneering speeches. Perhaps they are unaware that there are over 2,000 types with many different causes. And just as it took decades for the truth about tobacco and asbestos to emerge, who knows how much information the industry chooses to conceal about other cancer causing agents in our environment?

To see more of this issue, visit Labour Briefing.

The publication of Flash Boys, Michael Lewis’s bestselling exposé of high frequency traders (HFTs) in the finance industry, could hardly have been better timed as a call for the Feds to step in.

In the wake of the book’s launch in early April, several regulatory agencies rushed to disclose that they were already taking action. For much of the past year, it appeared, the Justice Department, the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority had been investigating HFT firms and exchanges for violations of insider trading and other Wall Street rules.

To read the full article, visit The Guardian.

When Mike Marqusee was diagnosed with multiple myeloma on 2007 he was adamant, largely for reasons of privacy, that he wasn’t going to write about his experience. But he changed his mind and a good thing he did so because he manages to pack into this slim volume of articles more than weightier tomes do in hundreds of pages.

Marqusee began writing not only celebrate the NHS and the treatment he has received but to defend it and, in particular St Bart’s hospital in London, from the current Tory-led attacks. He contrasts his time there with that of his compatriots in the US where treatment is expensive and health insurance even for those who can afford it — and 46 million can’t — rarely delivers what it promises.

See the full review at the Morning Star.

As I argue in my book Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, this is how our financialized society works: The goal is to keep debtors on the hook for as long as possible, wrapping debt around every possible asset and income stream to generate profit. After all, if we pay down our debts entirely, we are no longer reliable sources of revenue for the banks.

To read the full article, visit Al Jazeera America.

Norman Finkelstein is of course best known for his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–his books, lectures and media interviews on the subject over the last three decades–and for the considerable controversy it has generated.

Less known is that for many years he also taught political theory. It might come as something of a surprise that among his favorite works is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. This might come as a surprise since Finkelstein is well to the left of most admirers of the iconic 19th-century liberal thinker. Of course Mill was also a socialist and a feminist–indeed an early one (see Martha Nussbaum’s comments at the end of this interview). But in postcolonial studies Mill is widely regarded as an imperialist and a racist. An ambiguous and contested legacy, to be sure–which is part of Mill’s enduring hold on us.

Read the full article on the Huffington Post.

Hour 1 begins with an update on just how secure, or insecure our personal data on our computers really is with Dr. Tom Keenan, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Research Fellow within the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies with the University of Calgary. He talks about the latest threat that has infiltrated Internet Explorer.

Listen to the full interview at Tencer & Grose.

To view the review, visit The Los Angeles Review of Books.