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 […]
BY WAYNE ELLWOOD Say what you will about the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; he had chutzpah. What better place to a make a point about Latin America’s colonial inheritance than in front of the world’s media? So it was with a sense of occasion that the smiling Chávez strode across the floor of the […]
BY M ZIAUDDIN I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it. —Voltaire This has been the dilemma of those known in some circles as the ‘fundamentalists’ of democracy, free speech, rule of law, human rights, social justice and tolerance. Whenever these principles have come under […]
BY JAWED NAQVI THE news that pacifist-scholar Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, has joined India’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will further confound political punters. Some of them were already watching the motley group as a dark horse in the arriving parliamentary race. Others were warily seeing in it a spoiler, at least, for […]
BY PRAFUL BIDWAI Ever since Ahmedabad magistrate BJ Ganatra rejected Zakia Jafri’s petition in the Gujarat carnage case in December and held that Chief Minister Narendra Modi was not part of the “larger conspiracy” behind the butchery of nearly 2,000 Muslims in 2002, the Sangh Parivar has run a triumphalist campaign, and tried to turn […]
BY SUVAID YASEEN The fight by the occupation, and against it, is about decisive control of spaces – physical, territorial as well as those of ideas. In the case of the former, no surprises then that the Indian state spends massively out of its wealth to maintain more than half-a-million armed forces in Jammu and […]
BY PAUL MONAGHAN 2012 was the year that the world woke up to the inequities of corporate tax avoidance, with the barefaced tax aggression of Starbucks, Amazon, Microsoft and others forcing the issue on to the front pages of the newspapers. In 2013 governments began to respond (albeit meekly), with Britain’s pledge to close the […]
BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR One of the most tragic consequences of the three year war in Syria has been the destruction of historic architectural sites and the loss of archaeological treasures of immense significance. Severe damage has been caused to all the six world heritage sites in the country. Syria is arguably that one place on […]
BY SABINA KHAN As has been highly publicised, Iran is in the midst of negotiations regarding its nuclear programme with six world powers: Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, leads the group of the six countries, and is aiming to reach a deal within half […]