Bharat Bhushan With its dream of reaching greatness by hanging on to the coattails of the United States going bust, India needs to radically rethink its foreign policy. Rather than the ongoing tentative recalibration, it needs to be redesigned from the ground up. Although Indian political leaders value loyalty to a fault, this cannot be… Read More India’s Foreign Policy Is In Need Of Fresh Stewardship Columnists
Rafael Behr There is a Russian proverb: don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked. I first came across it as the epigraph to The Government Inspector, Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece satirising corruption and hypocrisy in the provinces of the tsar’s empire. The phrase sprang to mind last week when I learned that a 21st-century… Read More By sanctioning journalists, the Kremlin admits how much the truth hurts
By Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel “Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same… Read More Strangers in the Family Album: Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography
On Doval–Wang table: LAC situation, next steps to repair ties; visits taking place in run-up to SCO summit in China, possible visit by Putin to India NB: During the 1960’s the RSS hailed the American war of agression against Vietnam as a dharm-yuddha, or ‘holy war’: manifesting their visceral hatred of socialism and of communist… Read More Jaishankar heading to Moscow, Wang to Delhi amid strain in India ties with US. Remember Nehru’s non-alignment?
NB: As the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches (August 6 and 9, 1945); readers might like to read this article by two accomplished scholars of twentieth century history. DS ‘the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic… Read More U.S. leaders knew we didn’t have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway (2020)
Extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and forced labour among accusations upheld by court in judgment Haroon Siddique Legal affairs correspondent Russia has committed flagrant and unprecedented abuses of human rights since it invaded Ukraine in 2014, including extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and forced labour, the European court of human rights has found. The court’s grand chamber unanimously held that… Read More Russia has committed flagrant human rights abuses in Ukraine since 2014, rules ECHR
As territories shift and divide families, desperate parents are travelling to Russia to find their children, many of whom have been moved into military camps or orphanages Ruchi Kumar Ukrainian children from a Donetsk orphanage at a camp in Zolotaya Kosa, Russia. Up to 35,000 Ukrainian children may be held in Russia, with many feared… Read More ‘Basically impossible to get them back’: Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children is a war crime
NB: An important interview about an important book. DS Documents unearthed by Robert Parry and reported in an article entitled When Israel/Neocons Favoured Iran show that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin became an important source of covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, with the profits being invested in Jewish… Read More The People First: Rohini Hensman on Democracy, Resistance, and the Global Left
At least 12 killed including three children after Kremlin launches 298 drones and 69 missile strikes against neighbour Peter Beaumont in Kyiv Ukraine has condemned US “silence” after Russia carried out its largest air raid in three years of war, with a second straight night of massive drone and ballistic missile strikes killing at least 12… Read More Ukraine condemns US ‘silence’ after Russia’s biggest air raid of war
She faced endless opposition and threats to her life. This has become a reality for far too many journalists Maxine Peake A woman places flowers in front of a portrait of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Moscow, 2009. Photograph: Pavel Golovkin/AP What drives someone to become a journalist? A good journalist, someone whose keyboard is a tool for exposing… Read More The incredible tale of Anna Politkovskaya has taught me one thing: I could never be that brave
After the truth-shower 