At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric… It is only in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, to silence. —Albert Camus, The Plague World system chaos is not emerging ex nihilo, out of nothing. There have been conspicuous warnings. In [...]
It is Thanksgiving Day. The aroma of turkey; of dressing; candied sweet potatoes; green bean casserole; cranberry sauce; freshly baked yeast rolls; giblet gravy, and of pies emanating from the kitchen fills our nostrils. Home is the place to be today. But have you ever given thought to the law of the gobbler? This Day in [...]
Once again, the US is politically meddling with the conflict in Ukraine. The back-and-forth of Washington’s destabilizing efforts to bring “peace” to the country is a blatant attempt to secure the Nobel Peace Prize for President Donald Trump, whose proposed 28‑point “peace plan” for Ukraine is not a blueprint for stability but a capitulation to [...]
The United States’ decision to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council and, consequently, from this year’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) marks a worrying retreat from global human rights accountability. Although the announcement did not cite any specific reasons for the withdrawal, it reflects a deeper unwillingness to accept scrutiny under the same universal standards [...]
For the 70+ years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth II reportedly stuck to the adage of “never complain, never explain” when it came to addressing the public and the press. It remained a motto of true meaning, particularly when it came to initiating legal action against outside entities. In fact for many decades, the amount [...]
As the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group steams into the Caribbean and US forces intensify operations against alleged drug traffickers, the Trump administration appears to be signaling a more aggressive posture toward Venezuela. While the official justification centers on counter-narcotics enforcement, the scale and symbolism of deploying the world’s largest aircraft carrier suggest [...]
The Grand Chamber judgment delivered unanimously by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) July 9 in Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia represents a transformative moment in international human rights law. The ruling does far more than document Russia’s systematic violations from 11 May 2014 to 16 September 2022. It fundamentally recalibrates the ECHR’s [...]
Pakistan’s proposed Twenty-Seventh Constitutional Amendment (PCA), which is being hurried through Parliament, introduces sweeping changes to the country’s judicial and military structures. The amendment seeks to restructure the Supreme Court, establish a new Federal Constitutional Court, and redefine the hierarchy of the armed forces. Whether the PCA undermines judicial independence is a serious concern in [...]
The Red Scare blacklist era—one in which those in the entertainment industry were targeted, investigated and ostracized for their supposed political sympathies and associates—remains one of the film industry’s darkest chapters. It was a time when fear and conformity eclipsed both principle and legality. Today, under the guise of political activism, we are watching the [...]
“Left out here and driven away from there” — this old Dari proverb describes a person who has been rejected from both sides, meaning they can neither stay in the first place nor be accepted in the second. For 20-year-old Yasna, a young Afghan woman, and hundreds of thousands of other Afghan people who fled [...]
