Bharat Bhushan India-Maldives Row – Coercive diplomacy often backfires The Right-wing ecosystem, created and nurtured by the ruling BJP, has taken over, setting Indian diplomacy on a collision course with that of the tiny island nation Unless there was a deep-rooted controversy which ordinary mortals cannot fathom, it may not have been Prime Minister Modi’s intention to… Read More Old man at sea: The Maldives imbroglio
Etan Nechin GAZA casualties live statistics Since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, Israelis have been glued to their TV sets and scrolling through news and social media. The ordinarily news-obsessed public has become even more engrossed, and the war has seen the propagation of a point of view that for much of Israel’s media history… Read More Far right infiltration of Israeli media is blinding the public to the truth about Gaza / Major US newspapers heavily biased toward Israel
No one could accuse the U.S. of double standards. What it is vulnerable to is the accusation that it no longer has any standards at all… Modern Germany needs to believe that Israel’s creation was a “happy ending” to the horrors of the gas chambers… For Germany, its commitment to Israel is offered as a… Read More Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy
It has become an article of faith among many economists that China’s pro-market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s ushered in a sustained reduction in poverty. This narrative relies on figures from the World Bank, showing that over the past 40 years the number of people in China living in “extreme poverty” (less than US$1.90… Read More China’s capitalist reforms are said to have moved 800 million out of extreme poverty – new data suggests the opposite
Greg Conti It has quickly become a commonplace that American elite higher education is in a more perilous position than it has been in recent memory. Long-standing conservative discontent has crystallized as a result of recent events; multiple proposals targeting universities’ pocketbooks have been floated by lawmakers in the past weeks. Republican officials have made… Read More The Rise of the Sectarian University (in the USA)
More than 5% of global emissions are linked to conflict or militaries but countries continue to hide the true scale Doug Weir n early 2022, journalists began to ask us how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was affecting the climate crisis. While we could point to landscape fires, burning oil refineries and the thirst of diesel-hungry military… Read More The climate costs of war and militaries can no longer be ignored
‘I return often to Albert Camus’s Letters to a German Friend, written clandestinely during the occupation of France in 1943–44… published after the liberation, despite Camus’s initial opposition… His opening plea hangs in the air: “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” ‘ On November 9 the NYR Online published an essay… Read More Seth Anziska on Dominant Orthodoxies
Owen Jones Injustice is easy to oppose after it has receded into the past, and there is no cost to imagining yourself as a hero long after the event. Everyone celebrates the suffragettes now, but at the time they were vilified as hateful spinsters and terrorists. McCarthyism is a pejorative political label on right and… Read More 2023: the year governments looked at the climate crisis, and decided to persecute the activists
NB: If religious texts sanctify hatred and cruelty towards others, there is something wrong with them, and especially with us, for taking such injunctions literally. There is no such thing as my god versus your god, because the creator of the universe cannot possibly have chosen a small fragment of humanity to be regardful of,… Read More Reading the Bible with the eyes of the Canaanites: Neo-Zionism, political theology and the Land Traditions of the Bible (1967 to Gaza 2009)
The dark-money junktanks, and the Atlas Network, are a highly effective means of disguising and aggregating power. They are the channel through which billionaires and corporations influence politics without showing their hands, learn the most effective policies and tactics for overcoming resistance to their agenda, and then spread these around the world. This is how democracies become new… Read More What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies
