Yunupingu was a trailblazer in the fight for land rights and the constitutional recognition of Indigenous people in Australia. He died after a long illness. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese led tributes to the Gumatj clan leader, saying he was a great leader and statesman. “Yunupingu walked in two worlds within authority, power and grace, and… Read More Aboriginal ‘giant of a nation’ Yunupingu dies aged 74
Mallika Soni As more and more women continue to defy Iran’s compulsory dress code, the country’s judiciary chief threatened to prosecute women who appear in public without hijab “without mercy”, news agency Reuters reported quoting Iranian media. Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said, “Unveiling is tantamount to enmity with (our) values. Those “who commit such anomalous acts… Read More Women without hijab to be prosecuted ‘without mercy’: Iran’s judiciary chief
Over 100,000 people have been disappeared in the course of the destructive drug war waged in Mexico over the past two decades. Among the deceased are more than 150 journalists murdered for their work to expose the dense network of corruption and violence that links government officials, police, and the military with organized crime. The… Read More Chris Hedges: Mexico’s Epidemic of Murdered Journalists is an Ominous Warning to the Press
Sihem Bensedrine I was relieved when Hervé, a young man from Ivory Coast who occasionally helps me around the house, finally called. It had been four agonising days of radio silence. Since his landlady had evicted him, he had been wandering the streets of Raoued, a suburb of Tunis, trying to avoid the marauding gangs.… Read More A poisonous dictatorship has been built in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab spring
Nick Dearden A few months into his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order to promote competition in the American economy saying: “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power […] I believe the experiment failed.” While those might seem unlikely words from the once centrist champion of corporate… Read More Breaking corporate monopolies is the only way to save democracy
Thomas Rowley The day started with Russian law enforcement searching the homes of nine senior members of the country’s oldest human rights organisation, Memorial. Apparently, there was reason to believe that these Nobel Prize-winning historians and rights defenders had been “rehabilitating Nazism”. Investigators had allegedly found that three names on Memorial’s list of historical “Victims… Read More Russia targets its oldest human rights group, Memorial
JUAN COLE Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Vanuatu, a set of South Pacific islands, is not what you would call a prominent international player. The small country of a little over 300,000 people has nevertheless made history, according to UN News. It presented a resolution to the UN General Assembly asking the UN’s International Court of… Read More Tiny Islands of Vanuatu Convince UN to seek Int’l Court Ruling on Harms of Climate Emergency
On honesty as an attitude Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas. They were similar stylistically too: both wrote candidly, clearly and prolifically. William Fear A war still raged… Read More Orwell, Camus and truth
An interview with Michael Walzer on The Struggle for a Decent Politics Timothy Shenk From democratic socialists to right-wing populists, with plenty of anxious centrists in between, it seems like everyone agrees that liberalism is in trouble. But what about the qualities that liberals have shown at their best? In his latest book, The Struggle for a… Read More Liberal Commitments
Adam Tooze Saddam’s attack on Iran in the early 1980s indicated his violent ambition, but as far as Iraq’s economy is concerned it was the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the US-led riposte that delivered the first devastating shock. After a measure of recovery under the more relaxed sanctions regime of the late… Read More Iraq’s economic impasse twenty years after the invasion
After the truth-shower 