Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt, for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege does strange and unpleasant things to…
The creation of an independent and sovereign state of Kurdistan is a topic with a long history and differing visions for how to realise it. The territory currently occupied by the compact Kurdish population is around 500,000 kilometres. They live at the crossroads of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran, and in a number of neighbouring…
Two years after Russian President Vladimir Putin came to blows with his then prime minister Dmitri Medvedev over a Russian abstention from a UN resolution which paved the way for the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, a mysterious – but high quality – documentary appeared on the internet in Russia. A mysterious documentary…
In response to China’s increasing political and economic clout in the region of South Asia, Washington has intensified its efforts to promote its concept of the free and open Indo Pacific. Donald Trump’s administration has borrowed this expression from Prime Minister of Japan Shinzō Abe, who described his vision for the Indo Pacific region in…
At Wednesday’s debut of the impeachment hearings there was one issue upon which both sides of the aisle seemed to agree, and it was a comic-book caricature of reality. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff led off the proceedings with this: “In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace…
I just keep tripping on how dumb this latest US-backed military coup is. It’s in Bolivia in case you’ve lost track, which would be perfectly understandable since US-backed coups have become kind of like US mass shootings — there’s so many of them they’re starting to blend into each other. I mean, for starters the…
