Make Sense of the world
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In the frenzy and fury of yet another UK election that whirls and swirls around Brexit, our politicians are dancing in a conga line of counter-accusations, misinformation and outright lies. Savvy political pundits and sage pollsters assess and debate the direction of travel of the conga line. And...
Amid all the gloom and doom over the slow retreat of democracy, the past few weeks have come as a welcome relief for proponents of the liberal world order. Since the late 2000s, the election of right-wing, xenophobic and authoritarian leaders and the consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin in...
It’s a cliché in Westerns. The bad guys ride into town only to be met by a sheriff who stands tall. “I am the law,” the sheriff says, “and you boys better move on.” This line appears in King Vidor’s 1930 film, "Billy the Kid." But the speaker, sheriff William...
The wave of unrest that has swept through Iraq has gone from protest to violence, creating tension in the region. The demonstrations, which were initially motivated by discontent over the country’s economic stagnation and rampant government corruption, quickly devolved into chaos....
In October 2017, Tarana Burke’s 2006 "me too" movement was revived by a simple tweet from actress Alyssa Milano. A year later, the hashtag had been tweeted over 19 million times by women around the world. There is no question that the #MeToo campaign mobilized and united women across the globe....
As the Arab Spring morphed into a bloody civil war in Syria in 2011, there was an opportunity for the country’s Kurdish movement to establish, develop and consolidate an autonomous administration. Kurds in Syria have been under long-time oppression by the government of both Hafez al-Assad and...
It was first reported and initially denied by Saudi authorities. Then it was acknowledged as a “rogue” operation gone wrong. For the past year, every honest observer has clearly understood that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), ordered and most likely even stage-managed...
The fallout from the September attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities is continuing to reverberate throughout the Middle East, sidelining old enmities — sometimes for new ones — and re-drawing traditional alliances. While Turkey’s recent invasion of northern Syria is...
Even before the recent raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the erstwhile head of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), US President Donald Trump had spoken of how he had single-handedly defeated the caliphate. “Now, when I came, the caliphate was all over the place,” the...
In a recent interview with Turkish state broadcaster TRT World, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made clear his ambition for Ankara’s military offensive against Kurds in northern Syria. In an almost two-hour program on October 24, he explained his plan for demographic change in the Kurdish region....
In a remarkable confluence of events, the right-wing national leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel find themselves, at least for a brief historical moment, besieged by criticism and stark political dangers. In the US, President Donald Trump is facing a more serious...
