Remember Klaus Schwab’s interview of 2016 with a Swiss French TV moderator, in which Schwab said something to the extent, “Imagine by 2025 we may all have a chip implanted somewhere in our body or brain, and we may be able to communicate with each other without a telephone, even without using our voice…”? Klaus Schwab calls it a fusion between the physical, ...
The timing of US and Israeli allegations that United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff participated in Hamas’ October 7 attack on the Jewish state was hardly coincidental. The allegations, that have yet to be substantiated, and the halt in UNRWA funding by ten Western countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Au...
If one listens to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Hamas leaders, there is only one conclusion: an end to the Gaza carnage is nowhere in sight. If anything, judging by their increasingly maximalist statements, Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas are determined to fight to the bitter end irrespective of the carnage in Gaza and the fate of more than 100 peopl...
With the Israel Defense Forces continuing to block supplies from reaching shelters, refugee camps, and hospitals in Gaza, humanitarian workers are warning that there is “no end in sight” for the horrors facing an estimated 55,000 pregnant women as well as postpartum parents and newborns. Tess Ingram, a communications specialist for the United Nations Childre...
Kiev shot down a Russian Il-76 military transport plane carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs as it was flying over the border region of Belgorod on Wednesday. Patriot missiles were reportedly used during the attack, which was carried out with the aid of American instructors. The regime was informed of the flight ahead of time and was aware that it was carrying its det...
Israel has been given enormous license to control the security narrative in the Middle East for decades. This is not to say it is always in control of it – the attacks of October 7 by Hamas show that such control is rickety and bound, at stages, to come undone. What matters for Israeli security is that certain neighbours always understand that they are never...
Yemen’s Houthis are now in the headlines. Predictably, though, the coverage invariably is ahistorical, context-free and tendentious. I have yet to see any reporting of the United States’ role as a co-belligerent in the Saudi-led air campaign /blockade that over 8 years has resulted in a few hundred thousand dead Yemenis - the majority children (when we add t...
Israeli footballer Sagiv Yehezkel was deported from Turkey this week [Jan 15-ed] after being detained by police and fired by Super Lig club Antalyaspor for expressing support during a soccer match for more than 100 hostages kidnapped by Hamas during its October 7 attack on Israel. Sagiv Jehezkel points to a message that says “100 days, 7.10” -- a reference t...
Bild cited classified documents to report on Sunday [Jan 14-ed] that Germany is preparing for war with Russia per a detailed month-by-month scenario forecast produced by its Defense Ministry that begins in February 2024 and stretches into May 2025. According to them, Russia might destabilize the Baltic States and threaten the Suwalki Corridor after going on ...
America’s newly-minted flock of billionaires are a plague upon the land. Their grasping hands blight all that they touch. Insatiable egos drive them to possess or control everything: the financialized economy, the plethora of regulatory agencies, the Congress, and the White House; public education, universities, health care; land management; the judicial sys...
South Africa has now presented its charge of Israeli genocide in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and Israel has presented its rebuttal. Regardless of the ultimate judgment, a page has been turned. Israel’s actions in Gaza, assisted by the US, have changed the geopolitical landscape. The consequences stand to be dire and...
Former pharmaceutical executive and researcher Alexandra “Sasha” Latypova has laid out compelling arguments for why the “cartel” that orchestrated the dissemination and uptake of “biowarfare agents” - marketed as “COVID-19 vaccines” - operated with “very clear intent to harm” and to execute a “mass genocide of Americans.” Latypova worked more than 25 years i...
The impression that Iran regards Pakistan as a serious security threat on par with the Israeli spy base in Iraq and ISIS ones in Syria that it also struck in sequence. With all three taking place as the latest Israeli-Hamas war escalates into a regional proxy war between Israel-US and Iran, the innuendo is that Pakistan is aligned with them against Tehran, w...
US pressure on Israel to switch gears and focus on targetted precision strikes and killings, rather than indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip, potentially heightens the risk of the war escalating into a regional bust-up and expanding beyond the Middle East. The heightened risk suggests US efforts to allow Israel to continue attempting to destroy Hamas wh...
India-Maldives relations have undergone a sea change after Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu came to power with an “India out” agenda. Chinese philosopher Lao Tse says: “While the Clear mind listens to a bird singing, the Stuffed-Full-of-Knowledge and Cleverness mind wonders what kind of bird is singing.” The inveterate, pithy social blogger Harsh Goenka @hv...
The financial crisis of 2007–08, the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, badly damaged the international capitalist system and led to further erosion of confidence in the United States among its allies. US credibility was already undermined by its completely unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003, and over the past 20 years America’s position h...
President Putin said during a meeting last week with servicemen at a military hospital in Moscow that the Western elite, not Ukraine, are Russia’s true enemies. This is an important clarification since it’s easy for folks to lose sight of the conflict’s larger dynamics after over 22 months of fighting despite repeated reminders from the Kremlin about what’s ...
The centrepiece of the events during the year 2023 is undoubtedly President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who agreed to become President and accepted the challenge to resuscitate the economy of the bankrupt nation. The partial success of President Wickremesinghe’s “rescue act” during the year recalls what Hollywood actor Denzel Washington said about good and bad par...
The question is not if but when Gaza-related violence will spill onto the streets of European and American cities. This week’s killing in Beirut of Hamas executive Saleh al-Arouri (Jan 2-ed) significantly enhanced the threat posed by Hamas, Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, and jihadists. Adding to the increased threat of Gaza-related violence spilling into...
Newly inaugurated Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu came to power on an anti-Indian platform, but it was initially expected that he’d drop the demagoguery after entering office in favour of pragmatism due to his country’s close historical ties with its much larger neighbour. Even his request for India to withdraw its less than 100 service members from the c...
The entire landmass of Sri Lanka was called Lanka in the inscriptions of the Cholas written a thousand years ago, but in the ‘Brihat Samhita’, written by Varahamihira fifteen hundred years ago, a separate country called Sinhala is mentioned along with the name of Lanka (14: 11-16). As far as we know, the people in Sri Lanka are Sinhalese and therefore the wh...
The main purpose of Ramavatara was the killing of Ravana. Rama went to Ravana’s abode and destroyed him. That happened in Lanka, the city of Ravana. The location of Lanka was not in doubt at all until recently. It was common knowledge that Ravana’s Lanka was in Sri Lanka on the other side of the sea which can be reached by the Setu bund that starts from Dhan...
Palestinian airplane hijackings and attacks on Israeli civilians in Israel as well as on Israeli and Jewish targets abroad pockmarked the 1970s and 1980s. The violence put the Palestinian issue on the world agenda. The violence erupted, and at times, was driven by fierce debate among Palestinian guerilla leaders on whether to drop maximalist demands for repl...
The Houthis are going to prevent Israel-bound commercial ships from reaching Israeli ports as long as Israel prevents food, water and medicine from reaching Palestinians in Gaza. If Israeli leaders want to end the blockade, they need to stop killing Palestinians and end the siege. This is the simple, moral solution to the current crisis in the Red Sea. Over ...
Americans might be expected to be singing the Blues. We, as a country, have experienced a string of painful disappointments. Forever wars that we lose outright or abandon to chaos and suffering as our legacy. We huffed and puffed in a vain effort to bring down Russia only to see the Russians prevail in Ukraine militarily and to emerge from the test in better...
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer. She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from ab...
Ukraine launched a devastating terrorist attack with cluster and other munitions against purely civilian targets in the Russian border city of Belgorod shortly before the New Year, which killed at least 24 people and injured 131, including the deaths of four children. A sports complex, skating rink, university, and several residential neighbourhoods were hit...
Controversy over the release of Palestinian tax receipts tests the United States’ ability to pressure Israel and suggests that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ultra-religious, ultra-conservative government may not survive an end to the Gaza war. The controversy also suggests that differences among members of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist, ultra-reli...
While it is astounding that one small, feisty Arab tribe in the nation of Yemen has shown the mega-world how to creatively stand up to the Hegemon without threatening nuclear weapons, without initiating direct military conflict and yet achieve their goals – what is even more astounding is that the Houthis are not the least intimidated by the Empire’s pretent...
Back in August this year [2023-ed], reputable Egyptian investigative journalist Mohammed al-Alawi revealed exclusive materials regarding the purchase of a villa worth nearly $5 million by a woman named Olga Kiyashko. This would hardly be newsworthy if the person in question wasn’t the mother-in-law of the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky. According t...
The West’s unprecedented sanctions against Russia that were imposed in response to its special operation prompted that country to reorient its trade ties towards the Global South, yet President Putin recently made it clear that he isn’t closing the door on trade with that New Cold War bloc. He made his remarks at a “Meeting of the Council for Strategic Devel...