2022

By Judith Sunderland, Associate Director, Europe and Central Asia Division |- ( Human Rights Watch ) – Last week, a four-year-old Syrian girl named Loujin died after spending days with others adrift on a boat that had set off from Lebanon. Yesterday, we learned of three more Syrian children, one-, two-, and twelve-years-old, and three […]

Europe

As Falls Russia, So Falls the World: Exceptionalism Goes Global

John Feffer

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Here’s a nightmare scenario: Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin takes North Korean leader Kim Jong-un up on his recent offer to send 100,000 North Koreans to join the Russian president’s ill-fated attempt to seize Ukraine. Kim has also promised to send North Korean workers to […]

Featured

Iran Security Fires on Crowd Protesting Death in Custody of Kurdish Woman for “Bad Veiling”, Wounds 13

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Saturday, 13 protesters were wounded when security forces opened fire on them outside the house of the governor in Saghez, Iranian Kurdistan. This, according to the Hengaw human rights organization. The demonstrators were expressing their fury over the death in police custody of Mahsa “Zhina” Amini, 22, a Kurdish […]

Cold War

When Politicians get involved in Science: The marble statue of Gregor Mendel

Anne-Ruth Wertheim

It is 2022, the bicentenary of the birth of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, and this is being celebrated in all kinds of ways. In 1955, as a biology student, I travelled with a group of young people to Brno (then part of Czechoslovakia), where he had done his experiments with […]

Climate Crisis

‘It’s getting close’: As the megadrought grinds on, Southwest Water in Doubt

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Sydnee Wilson | – ( Cronkite News) – PHOENIX – NASA satellite photos show how drastically the water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead have receded in just the past few years. They demonstrate the severity of long-term drought and the challenges Arizona will face to conserve and enhance its precious water supply. […]

infrastructure

After oil: what Malaysia and Iran may look like in a post-Fossil Fuel Future

The Conversation

By Rowena Abdul Razak, London School of Economics and Political Science and Asma Mehan, Texas Tech University | – As the devastation of climate change makes the need to decarbonise clearer by the day, countries face the question of what to do with their old fossil fuel infrastructure. While some environmental activists have taken to […]

Featured

Top 6 things wrong with DeSantis’s Stunt of Flying Asylum-Seekers to Martha’s Vineyard

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Stunts like Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s program of rounding up and flying to Martha’s Vineyard Venezuelan and Colombian asylum-seekers, who are in the country legally awaiting the adjudication of their asylum status, have definite downsides. DeSantis helped run an explicitly racist Facebook page before he was governor of Florida, and […]

Banking

In Turkey’s plunging Economy, Conspiracy and Corruption allegations Abound

Global Voices

By Civic Media Observatory | – ( Globalvoices.org ) – Whether on a date or at a family gathering, one topic of conversation is on everyone’s lips in Turkey: the country’s deepening economic crisis. There are several angles to the story. While Erdoğan’s government argues that the country is in an “economic war” against enemies, […]