2025

Gaza “a Gaping Wound on Humanity:” Spain Convenes Int’l Conference to call for Arms Embargo on Israel

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Spanish wire service EFE reports that delegations from 20 countries met Sunday in Madrid in a push to pressure Israel to halt its total war on Gaza and to establish a Palestinian state. Convened by Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, the conference sought to move to concrete actions. Israel […]

Israel/ Palestine

Siege Politics: Netanyahu’s Crisis-Driven Grip on Power

Foreign Policy in Focus

Even mild criticism produces splenetic reactions from the Israeli leader. By Imran Khalid | ( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – By now, it should surprise no one that Benjamin Netanyahu prefers the echo chamber of his own making to the international chorus demanding accountability. The Israeli prime minister, clinging to office as tenaciously as […]

Donald Trump

Starving Babies: The Self-Liquidation of U.S. Global Soft Power

Alfred W. McCoy

( Tomdispatch.com ) – With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let’s recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you’re a this-or-that and you shout back: “Takes one to know […]

Archaeology

Genetic Study finds Echoes of the Early Modern Ethnic Cleansing of Spain’s Muslims

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A genetic history study of Spain by Gonzalo Oteo-Garcia et al. in Genome Biology eloquently confirms the story of the great seventeenth-century ethnic cleansing of the remaining crypto-Muslims of Spain. As Mar Jonsson writes in his 2007 “The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609–1614: the destruction of an […]

Israel/ Palestine

WHO: 94% of Gaza Hospitals Damaged or Destroyed

Middle East Monitor

( Middle East Monitor ) – The UN reported on Friday that at least 94% of hospitals in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, with half no longer operational, Anadolu reports. Citing the World Health Organization (WHO), UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said at a news conference that “the intensification of hostilities has brought Gaza’s already […]

Climate Crisis

For many Island Species, the next Tropical Cyclone may be their Last

The Conversation

By Simon Valle, Bangor University and David Jorge Pereira, University of Birmingham (The Conversation) – When a major cyclone tears through an island nation, all efforts rightly focus on saving human lives and restoring livelihoods. However, these storms have permanent consequences for other species that are often forgotten. As the world continues to heat, cyclones […]

Featured

EVs will Make Up 25% of New Car Sales Globally in 2025, up from 20% last Year

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Electric vehicles are expected to make up some 25% of cars sold globally in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency. Given where we were only a decade ago, this is a world-historical statistic. In 2016, EVs made up a little less than one percent of light vehicle sales. The […]

censorship

Kneecap Band Member’s Arrest is not the Issue, Criminalizing Opposition to Genocide of Palestinians Is

Middle East Monitor

by Brendan Ciarán Browne and Elian Weizman ( Middle East Monitor ) – Anyone with the most modest modicum of common sense and critical insight will be well aware – Kneecap, more specifically the mass hysteria that has erupted over a band member holding a Hezbollah flag on stage at a gig […]

Books

Why ‘The Coin’ by Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher has won the Dylan Thomas Prize

The Conversation

(The Conversation) – Daniel G. Williams, Swansea University (The Conversation) – Yasmin Zaher’s remarkable novel The Coin has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under the age of 40. This is not a story that begins at the beginning. Instead, its narrator starts with dirt and an obsession with cleanliness, but suggests […]

Archives for 2025