Michael Day, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Tings Chak The television series Asking the Vast Earth (问苍茫, 2023) opens with a scene of a young Mao Zedong swimming in the Xiang River, swollen from the heavy rains. A fisherman calls from the bank to the lone swimmer: ‘You fool, you’re asking to die! The river is raging after the storm—there are boats, why are you swimming?’ Mao laughs and calls back: ‘Never mind how fierce the water is. Once you understand its temper, you ca

Public domain image. By Vijay Prashad On 2 September, fragments from a US missile tore through the roof of a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, in Iran’s southern county of Sirik. Four people were killed, including a child, and sixty-eight were wounded. The United States has made a custom of bombing weddings – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and now Iran. When US Vice-President J. D. Vance was asked about the dead, he shrugged: ‘Things happen’. The sentence should be entered into

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters sit on a vehicle in the north of Raqqa city, Syria February 5, 2017. By Rezgar Akrawi The People’s Palace Scene: The End of an Experiment and the Beginning of a Question On 25 August 2026, Mazloum Abdi announced from the People’s Palace in Damascus the end of the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and their dissolution as an independent military force, alongside the dissolution of the Autonomous Administration and its affilia

Macedonia’s Foreign Minister Timcho Mucunski with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar -- image via Timcho Mucunski on Instagram By Biljana Vankovska A few days ago, when I landed at Budapest Airport on my way to an international conference devoted to serious questions of international politics, the first thing I saw was a huge civilian aircraft bearing a name unfamiliar to me: Isair. It was not difficult to guess, but I checked anyway. It was an Israeli air carrier. At this

Sarah J Malerich, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Jeffrey H. Altschul Cultural heritage is under attack in the United States. The National Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106 regulation, which balances economic development and historic preservation, has been rewritten to leave historic places in the path of the wrecking ball at the federal government’s whim. Developers contend that a new regulation is required because the Section 106 process is too slow, too unpred

USS Abraham Lincoln, May 29, 2026 -- public domain image By Benyasiri Eimviriyapong The arrival of the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) for a ‘leisure trip’ in Thailand before returning to its campaign of destruction against the people of West Asia demands immediate interrogation and opposition. For us Thai people, and those in sites of American plunder across the globe, this a rattling of the US’ cold war colonial chains on its most loyal lap dog, while conducting a war of aggre

Flood devastation -- image via news video screenshot By Madhab Pant At roughly 8:30 AM on 26 August 2026, a wall of water, mud, ice, and massive boulders roared down the Lhende Khola into the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river systems. The surge struck without local rainfall or warning sirens, catching border communities like Timure, mid-morning. Initial reports mistook the ground tremors for an earthquake, but satellite and seismic data later confirmed the real trigger: a high-al

A Little Green Scarves rally in Argentina -- image via X By Maisa Bascuas On 20 August, during the 23rd edition of the Council of the Americas in Buenos Aires, Javier Milei concluded his speech to the business elite by blaming the ‘little green scarves’ and voluntary termination of pregnancy (VTP) for the declining birth rate, the slowdown in economic growth, and the crisis in the pension system. The tactic is politically effective: it reduces a global demographic trend to a

Massive state and federal lawsuits take Meta to task over widespread harm to children. sharpemtbr, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons By Sonali Kolhatkar As a mother of two children who has often been on the losing side of family battles against screen time, I’ve been closely monitoring New Mexico’s landmark lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. State Attorney General Raúl Torrez took the company to task to protect children “from sexual abuse, online sol

Iranian missile display at the Holy Defense Museum in Tehran -- Fars Media Corporation, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Vijay Prashad The gravest danger in the present war is not that Iran has already decided to manufacture a nuclear weapon. There is no verified evidence of such a decision. The danger is that another major US escalation could convince Tehran that remaining a non-nuclear state inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) no longer provides protection, recogni

Axadem, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Vijay Prashad Dear friends and colleagues, The United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran in February of this year. For six months, US missiles and bombs have fallen upon civilian and military targets inside the country. Hospitals, schools, energy facilities, and neighbourhoods have been struck. The 168 schoolgirls killed in Minab have become the terrible symbol of this war. Iranians have been forced to live

Trump on August 14, 2026 -- public domain image By Dae-Han Song Trump offered to scale down the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise (carried out annually by the US Forces in Korea (USFK) and Republic of Korea (ROK) military). In Trumpian style, the decision was framed as everything all at once: punishment against South Korea for its tepid response on Iran; and as a conciliatory gesture to North Korea. And, the decision, in Trumpian fashion, fell flat on its face. Rather than feelin

Crop from The sleep of reason produces monsters (No. 43), from Los Caprichos -- public domain image By Jorge Coulon In 1799, Francisco de Goya published Los Caprichos. Among his engravings was one destined to stand the test of time: a man sleeps, leaning over a table, whilst owls, bats and creatures of the night emerge from behind him. At the bottom, a phrase: ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’. More than a century later, from a fascist prison, Antonio Gramsci wrote abou

Abelardo de la Espriella being interviewed while campaigning for the Colombian presidential elections May, 2026 -- public domain image By Vijay Prashad In August, right-wing billionaire Abelardo de la Espriella took office as Colombia’s president and vowed to move an agenda of the far right even though he won by less than a percentage point over the left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda. It is characteristic of the far right of a special type to adopt any mandate and pretend that t

Fidel Castro speaks to a crowd of over 100,000 people at the Plaza de la Revolucion, Havana, January 2, 1969, for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution By Dayan Jayatilleka The month he turned 50, my father, Mervyn de Silva, and my mother, Lakshmi, were in Havana watching Fidel Castro take over the chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement at its 6th Summit. After my father died, I discovered in his briefcase the embossed invitation on stiff parchment. He had treasured it fo

Public domain image By Shiran Illanperuma On 16 August 1976, representatives from eighty-six countries met in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for the Fifth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries. This was the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to be held in Asia and perhaps the largest international conference ever held in Sri Lanka. In her inaugural address to the summit, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike – the world’s first woman p

Mass protest in Argentina against the land bill on August 7 -- image via news video screenshot By Julian Bokser Javier Milei’s government recently suffered a double defeat. The first occurred in the streets, with massive protests against his plan to liberalize land purchases by foreigners. The second took place in the halls of the Argentine Congress, where he failed to secure enough votes to pass the bill as presented. Both defeats point to the same thing: a power project tha

Göbeklitepe site in May, 2025 -- public domain image By Erdem Denk While shooting a documentary at Göbeklitepe, I encountered strikingly different historical interpretations of the site. An international group of New Age seekers seemed to be searching for extraterrestrial connections there, but when I pointed out that the enclosures had originally been roofed, they recast the T-shaped pillars as traces of humanity’s mystical past. Representatives of an NGO working with conser

By Grieve Chelwa and Vijay Prashad Across Africa, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) presents itself as the custodian of macroeconomic stability. Its latest Article IV staff reports on Ethiopia. Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia are written for economies with very different histories and institutions. Yet they converge on a familiar prescription: fiscal consolidation, tighter monetary policy, market-determined exchange rates, subsidy reform, deregulation and ‘priva

Carissa Rogers, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Rezgar Akrawi A few days ago, TIME revealed how an artificial intelligence system went out of control and attacked other systems. Days later, more than 1,100 engineers at major artificial intelligence companies signed a joint petition calling for the development of technical tools and international governance mechanisms to regulate the pace of its development. What we are witnessing today is not the domination of robots over