World

If controlled by corporations, digital farming initiatives create new poverty traps for small food producers while promoting environmental-destructive intensive agricultural practices. Smartphones have revolutionised our way of living. No need to visit a library when looking for information—we just go online. Convenience is convincing. But can digital technology solve all the problems in the world? The idea of going high-tech in[Read More...]

History is strewn with the broken branches of twisted irony.  An individual who found himself entangled in it was the late Colin Powell, who, as a military man, gave a doctrine his name only to forgo it as a diplomat. The Powell Doctrine was one of certitude and caution: do not engage in conflict except in conditions whereby you could[Read More...]

Colin Powell, the first black secretary of state who saw his legacy tarnished when he made the case for war in Iraq in 2003, died on Monday from complications from COVID-19. News of his death elicited strong reaction in Iraq, which has paid the price of what they call “never-ending wars”. Many of them wish he had been tried of[Read More...]

No one can stop him.  He can barely stop himself.  The former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, seems to be everywhere, fighting the poor cause.  At the very least, he is everywhere with the press cameras, the niggling concerns, the irritations that make it into the twenty-four-hour news cycle before sinking with toxic charm.  He is the perfect ingredient in[Read More...]

During the autumn of 2020, the United States lost one of its most brilliant, incisive, yet unheralded thinkers in Sherle R. Schwenninger. One of Schwenninger’s many gifts was his ability to anticipate far in advance trends that would shape U.S. foreign policy and the global political economy. He was also one of the first thinkers to promote an alternative to[Read More...]

The fact that Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature is welcome news, especially as the Swedish Academy is historically known for lacking in diversity, as if intellectual creativity is largely confined to Western intellectual circles. It is premature to suggest that the Academy has finally decided to break away from its ethnocentric past and[Read More...]

The Jewish Chronicle warns that the dismissal of Prof David Miller is ‘just the beginning’ The Israel lobby appears to be readying for a campaign to root out leftwing academics in the UK critical of Israel’s continuing oppression of the Palestinian people – echoing its efforts against the previous leader of Britain’s Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn. As with the attacks[Read More...]

The global debt has jumped to a new high of $226 trillion, said the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on October 13, 2021. As reason of this leap in global debt, the IMF has cited the Covid-19 and policies put in place to respond to it. Global debt in 2020, including public and private borrowing, “jumped by 14 percent to a record high $226 trillion,”[Read More...]

For decades, I kept a poster on my wall that I’d saved from the year I turned 16. In its upper left-hand corner was a black-and-white photo of a white man in a grey suit. Before him spread a cobblestone plaza. All you could see were the man and the stones. Its caption read, “He stood up alone and something[Read More...]

Amid ongoing outrage over global vaccine inequity, Pope Francis on Saturday urged pharmaceutical companies to “make a gesture of humanity” by lifting intellectual property protections and sharing Covid-19 vaccine technology with the world. The pope’s remarks came during a video address to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, a collection of grassroots groups, in which he expressed his belief “that we are not condemned[Read More...]