Fri 21 May 2021: I’m old enough to remember a time when it appeared the Internet would be a great multiplying force for democracy and the advancement of human rights, allowing global activists and citizen journalists to shine a light where there was previously none. But then came social media and the rise of the […]
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Fri 07 May 2021: Sending more soldiers and weapons to northern Mozambique would only serve to exacerbate the problem. The recent raid by supposedly ISIL-linked insurgents on the northern Mozambican city of Palma, which left dozens of civilians dead and displaced 30,000 others, has given rise to a narrative that Africa is now a hotbed […]
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Sun 25 April 2021: The US is using the tragic events of 1915 as a political tool to bludgeon an ally who is not willing to blindly fall in line with its diktats. The United States of America, as a polity and a nation, always has this self-perception that it is a proud bastion of […]
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Thu 22 April 2021: The war in Afghanistan has been called the most pointless conflict of all time. It is probably the most disastrous military venture launched by the US, Britain and their allies in the past 100 years. The Taliban, though, will be celebrating what they see as a historic victory when NATO forces […]
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Sun 18 April 2021: On March 13, Sarath Weerasekara, Sri Lanka’s minister of public security, announced that the government will ban wearing of the burqa and close more than 1,000 Islamic schools in the country. The minister was quoted as saying that “the burqa” was a “sign of religious extremism” and has a “direct impact […]
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Tue 13 April 2021: It is a fact that rape and sexual abuse have been used as weapons of war throughout history. The lack of security leaves women and girls, in particular, more vulnerable than usual to violence. For a long time, this was just accepted as inevitable in conflicts, and few efforts were made […]
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Sat 10 April 2021: Audio chatroom app Clubhouse is on the rise in the Arab world, providing a rare platform for open debate on taboo subjects from so-called honour killings in Egypt to sexual identity in Iraq, but with some authorities restricting the use and others wary. The app launched by a San Francisco-based company […]
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Wed 31 March 2021: In the recently released report, Freedom House downgraded India from free to partly free due to the atmosphere of intolerance, treatment of journalists, protestors and religious minorities. The events of 19th March at Jhansi station more than reflect this fact. On 19th March two nuns belonging to Sacred Heart congregation, who […]
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Sat 27 March 2021: Throughout his estrangement with Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan had considered it a principled and moral position to take. This was not merely a radical political stand-off between a country that had rid itself of a long and bitter legacy of military coups, and a military regime that seized […]
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Thu 25 March 2021: Boris Johnson claimed the UK’s vaccine breakthrough was brought about by ‘giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders’. But nothing could be further from the truth. On the anniversary of the United Kingdom’s first lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic, as candles were lit in doorways and the country […]
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