BY ROBERT FISK Tarif Khalidi is a big, bearded bear of a man, the kind you would always choose to play Father Christmas, or perhaps a Cossack leader sweeping across the Russian steppe, reins in one hand, sword in the other. But Tarif – or Uncle Tarif as I invariably call him – is an […]
BY ALI AHMED A new study ‘Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk?’ conducted by the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War along with Physicians for Social Responsibility, says that even a ‘limited’ nuclear war using a 100 weapons would disrupt global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more […]
BY JO LATEU Whatever your memories of your school days – and let’s face it, for most of us, they were not ‘the best years of our lives’, whatever our parents claimed – the chances are you were taught in your mother tongue. Or at least, you were if you are a privileged Westerner who […]
Titled The Saint and The Doctor, Arundhati Roy’s introduction to a new, annotated edition of Dr. B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is an intensive examination of the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate and its relevance in India. Excerpts: Today, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of its celebrated GDP. In a nation of 1.2 […]
BY VIJAY PRASHAD In late February, Filippo Grandi, the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the United Nations agency tasked with the welfare of the Palestinians, visited Yarmouk, a neighbourhood in Damascus, Syria. When he entered Yarmouk, the people came to greet him and to collect much-needed supplies. They emerged, he said, “like ghosts from the depths […]
BY NIRUPAMA SUBRAMANIAN Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, the former President of Sri Lanka, has among her photographs a collector’s item taken when she was an 11-year-old girl. Crowded into the frame are no less than five South Asian Prime Ministers who served at different times over five decades in the 20th Century: her father S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, […]
BY FRED PEARCE Scientists are trying to understand if the unusual weather in the Northern Hemisphere this winter – from record heat in Alaska to unprecedented flooding in Britain – is linked to climate change. One thing seems clear: Shifts in the jet stream play a key role and could become even more disruptive as […]
BY KHURRAM HUSAIN THE strong demands for military action against the TTP have put one party and its position regarding militancy in a tight spot. The PTI of Imran Khan, which made a large platform out of opposing action and promoting talks as the only way to deal with the terrorists, is now searching for […]
BY CHRIS COLTRANE At the end of last year, the BBC’s Panorama programme revealed that anti-poverty charity Comic Relief had invested millions of dollars in tobacco and alcohol companies, and $1 billion in the arms manufacturer British Aerospace. This is an understandable mistake to make. Comic Relief’s management team probably just decided to launch a […]
By Ramzy Baroud Omar is a 7-year-old boy from Gaza. His family managed to obtain the necessary permits that allowed him to cross the Erez checkpoint to Jerusalem, through the West Bank, in order to undergo surgery. He was accompanied by his father. On the way back, the boy and his father were stopped at […]