In March 2024, the Middle East Committee of Westmoreland Church, which is a very active  "UCC" congregation located on the borderline between Maryland and Washington DC, invited Helena to go and speak to their members on the topic "Hamas: A Primer."

The event took place on April 21, 2024, and took the form of a conversation conducted, for the first 35 minutes, by longtime Middle East Committee member Robert Mertz. In the second half of the program, several attendees at the gathering asked questions, both in-person from the church parlor, and online via the event's well-populated Zoom feed.

This episode contains the recording of nearly the whole of the April 21 event. Here is the "resource list" referred to toward the end of the episode:

•Online resource list: bit.ly/Keys-4-H

•Sign up for Helena’s (roughly weekly) newsletter at: eepurl.com/b-5d_9

•Learn about her company’s many books on Gaza, Palestine, etc, at: Justworldbooks.com

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The second episode of Palcast discusses the shared struggle of the Palestinian and Irish peoples. From Captain Boycott, to Bloody Balfour, to hunger strikes, Dr Yousef Aljamal, Helena Cobban and Tony Groves delve into the shared struggle between the two nations, and indeed the anti-apartheid movements globally. We also look at the mistakes that Ireland has made and what the movement for Palestinian self-determination can learn from them. Please join us at patreon.com/tortoiseshack

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 As Israel's genocide in Gaza continues, PalCast's Dr Yousef Aljamal and his co-host Helena Cobban survey the situation on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank and the waves of pro-Palestinian sympathy that have swept around the whole world, including throughout the Global South and even at the grassroots level within most Western countries. They note the continued ability of Washington DC to block effective U.N. action for a ceasefire, the declining power of the United States in world affairs, and the need for a deep renewal of the Palestinian political leadership. Please join us at patreon.com/tortoiseshack

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This episode introduces the people behind a brand new series, PalCast, which will be hosted by Palestinian refugee (and friend of the shack) Dr Yousef Aljamal and his longtime collaborator and friend Helena Cobban, herself an activist and author of great renown. PalCast is a collaboration between Just World Educational and Tortoise Shack Media, which produces the series from its base in Dublin, Ireland. This twice weekly series will discuss the ongoing Gaza-Israel crisis, the geopolitics at play, the place of Palestine in the world, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, as summed up in the mantra 'One World, One Struggle.' One World, One Struggle which is being used with the permission of the Blood Sunday Families. Music is Sabreen (West Bank 1987) 

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In this episode, Helena Cobban presents a voiced version of the essay she published today on the Globalities website, which is titled, "Untangling Syria's devastating civil war." In the essay, Ms. Cobban, a long-time analyst of Syria's affairs, expresses her cautiously optimistic assessment of the possibility that recent shifts in West Asian politics and diplomacy may now, finally, allow for a winding down of the conflict inside Syria.

If you're interested in what you hear here, head to the essay in the text version, where you will also find all the hyperlinks Ms. Cobban put in there, as well as a map and some other informative graphics.

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In this episode of her Global Shifts series, Just World ed President Helena Cobban looks at the events and developments of the past week that illustrate the big shifts now underway in the global balance. This week, she looks at the continuing fallout from the visit that French Pres. Emmanuel Macron paid recently to Beijing, and also at this week's visit there by Brazilian Pres. Lula Da Silva. Then, she looks at three big ongoing developments in West Asia, concerning Yemen, Syria-- and the current worrying increase in U.S. military deployments in the Persian Gulf region.

Ms. Cobban rounds off the episode by taking a step back to survey the 500-year history of Western colonial involvement in the Asian and Indian Ocean regions and the current signs that that era is starting to come to an end.

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 In today's episode Just World Ed's Helena Cobban presents her review of the key shifts in the global balance that we've seen over the past week. This episode covers:

• The ongoing contest between NATO and Russia over Ukraine 
•  The two big diplomatic events in Beijing this week
• Implications of Pres. Macron's visit to Beijing
• Implications of the new rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and
• The effects of this rapprochement on developments in the Mashreq area of West Asia. 

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In mid-January 2023, the veteran analyst of world affairs Helena Cobban published an essay at Globalities.org in which she explored the urgent need for a country-wide ceasefire or armistice for Ukraine, and explored the value of the precedent set by the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953. She also looked at the issue of armistices more broadly and noted several features of the Korean armistice that are particularly relevant to the case of Ukraine today.

In late March 2023 Ms. Cobban voiced this essay as the inaugural episode in this new podcast series from Just World Educational. Globalities is a project of Just World Educational.

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This was the sixth conversation in Just World Educational's project to produce and share multimedia resources to inform, educate, and engage new generations of (especially) Americans on the need to Ban All Nuclear Weapons and dismantle all existing nuclear arsenals, including our own.

In this convo, co-hosts Helena Cobban and Amelle Zeroug talked to William B. Quandt, an American scholar, author and professor emeritus in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia.  Dr Quandt previously served as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and as a member on the National Security Council in the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter administrations.

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This was the fifth conversation in Just World Educational's project to produce and share multimedia resources to inform, educate, and engage new generations of (especially) Americans on the need to Ban All Nuclear Weapons and dismantle all existing nuclear arsenals, including our own.

     In this convo, co-hosts Helena Cobban and Amelle Zeroug talked to Joseph Gerson, Executive Director of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security and Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau. Gerson, a veteran anti-nuclear organizer has just been at a key meeting in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia on the international coordination of Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZs) and who was with us from Vienna where he's attending many ICAN/TPNW-related meetings.     

Listen to additional episodes in this series which will be released twice-weekly through the end of June.

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