by MAHIR ALI

Among political leaders in the 21st century, it would be hard to conjure up a greater contrast than the one bet-ween the grift-addicted Donald Trump and the man described as “the world’s poorest president”.

Jose “Pepe” Mujica, who died last week at the age of around 90, resented the frequent references to his relative poverty. He failed to see why a nation’s president should live more ostentatiously than the majority of his constituents. The trappings of power did not attract Mujica when he became president of Uruguay in 2010 — receiving the presidential sash from the senator who polled the highest votes — his wife, Lucia Topalansky.

“This world is crazy because it is surprised by the normal,” he once proclaimed. “The poor are those who want more.” As head of state, he continued to live in a humble abode on the vegetable and chrysanthemum farm he co-owned with Topalansky, and drove to work in his sky-blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle, rejecting the presidential palace with its 42 staff members, as well as the black limousines he was offered. He saw these and other unnecessary luxuries as representing the trappings of a monarchy.

His frills-free austerity won him fans worldwide, but not all of them understood exactly why he was so keen to establish a remarkably different leadership model in a relatively tiny Latin American state. Had they paid adequate attention to his speeches and interviews, they might have realised that El Pepe recognised the resilience of capitalism — and, much like Marx, appreciated its historical significance — but also understood that the culture of consumerism and accumulation of wealth it had ushered in needed to be dismantled. He knew this could not be accomplished overnight.

There are lessons to be learned from a Uruguayan guerrilla.

As a young man, Mujica played a prominent part in the Tupamaro insurgency that flourished in the ’60s and ’70s — named, like Tupac Shakur, after Tupac Amaru II, a Peruvian rebel executed in the 18th century by Spanish colonialists. It initially focused on robberies aimed towards the redistribution of wealth, which inevitably earned comparisons with Robin Hood. But when the state resorted to violence, the Tupamaros did not turn the other cheek.

Dawn for more

by HANNA HOMESTEAD

President Trump is requesting a record-high $1.01 trillion “defense” budget for FY 2026 while gutting federal agencies and social services that actually keep the country safe – things like clean air and water protection, Medicaid, child nutrition programs, the Department of Education, green energy, and so much more.  

The U.S. already spends more on the military than the next nine countries combined despite the Pentagon being the only federal agency that has never passed a federal audit. The United States government alone operates more than 90% of the world’s foreign military bases, controls more than 42% of the world’s nuclear warheads, and dominates 43% of the global arms trade. 

As the world’s largest arms dealer, the U.S. sells weapons to the majority of the world’s authoritarian governments and U.S.-made weapons are routinely implicated in human rights abuses – including facilitating Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank, and fueling the brutal proxy war in Sudan. 

Half of the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget will be handed over to corporations and lobbyists who profit from producing weapons that drive political repression, endless war, and climate collapse – including billionaires like Elon Musk. The budget also includes funding and authorization for domestic use of the military to facilitate mass deportations and detentions at an unprecedented scale.

While Pentagon contractors are set to receive record-high public subsidies, too many Americans are struggling to meet their basic needs. Despite being the richest country in the world, the U.S. has the lowest education and health outcomes and highest rate of child poverty among all economically advanced nations. Wealth inequality has never been higher – and three-quarters of the country are pessimistic about their children’s financial future.

There are no militarized solutions to the challenges facing American families and communities. More war and weapons makes us all less safe, not more. Instead of a record-high budget for war profiteers, what could federal spending do for families and communities?

National Priorities for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” — Guy Debord, 1967.

Dear reader,

I remember the first time I realised I was living inside a “spectacle”. It happened during a job interview in 2020, when a media founder leaned forward with alarming intensity and asked, “So, do you have a YouTube channel? Any televised events? What’s your Twitter follower count?” I blinked. The awkward silence stretched as I mentally tallied my embarrassingly modest social media presence. “I’m more of a silent observer than a content creator,” I said. The interviewer’s disappointment was palpable. “We are looking for someone with established digital influence,” he explained. “Our brand ambassador needs to be a brand themselves.”

I hadn’t applied to be a brand ambassador. I’d applied to be a journalist. Yet there I was, being evaluated not for my skills or experience, but for my failure to commodify my existence into digestible content. Failure to package oneself as a “performing” product can render one obsolete in a marketplace that values visibility over competence.

How did we get here?

In the 1950s, people started gathering around bulky television sets with rabbit-ear antennas, mesmerised by the flickering images that promised escape from ordinary life. Today, we carry those escape hatches in our pockets, compulsively checking them 205 times a day on average (according to a 2025 survey). And during these hours we click, comment, share, rate, and curate life.

We have moved from being passive consumers of spectacle through television to active producers and curators of our own spectacles through smartphones and social media. The lines between observer and performer have blurred beyond recognition. And this has consequences.

“The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbour because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialisation of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe,” wrote Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society. Quite ironically, Ellul wrote this in 1954 and not in the 2020s. How much more isolated have we become with our digital universes now personalised by algorithms designed to maximise our engagement rather than our understanding?

The algorithms don’t just suggest content; they tell us how to perceive reality. They don’t merely reflect our interests, they create them through feedback loops.

This too has consequences. Mainly on our “self”.

In the age of social media, everyone can pursue micro-celebrity status through scrupulously curated online personas. Our digital selves have become products to be marketed in the attention economy, where the currency is followers, likes, and engagement rates. We’ve moved beyond merely worshipping celebrities; we now apply celebrity logic to our own lives, viewing our experiences as content or “events” to be packaged and consumed rather than moments to be lived.

Frontline for more

by WYATT REED

A livestreamed Iranian royalist chat revealed a network of foreign-educated elites plotting to plunder Iran’s economy after realizing their dream of regime change.

The CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, has drawn criticism following his participation in an online discussion workshopping ways to exploit Iran in the event of regime change. The event wad hosted by NUFDI, the main DC-based advocacy group for the monarchist movement surrounding Reza Pahlavi, whose father was the last reigning Shah of Iran.

The discussion, marketed by one prominent online Pahlavi booster as an effort “to present designs that could be quickly implemented in Iran after the fall of the Islamic Republic” and “the establishment of a sound government,” was held to cobble together a loose plan for the privatization of Iran’s economy following an apparently to-be-determined regime change scenario. It’s unclear whether the vision laid out by the two Iranian expats represents a concrete blueprint for toppling the government, but the content of the chat suggested the Uber CEO seeks lucrative gains in the event of a successful regime change operation.

Shameful that @dkhos & @shervin are speaking at a NUFDI event—an Iranian monarchist group pushing for military strikes on Iran, collective punishment via sanctions, & viciously attacking other opposition voices more than the regime itself.

Maybe they don’t know. But they should. pic.twitter.com/OeEcL8jtBQ

— Sina Toossi (@SinaToossi) May 3, 2025

Asked by fellow uber-wealthy US-based Iranian venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar what he would do in the “first 100 days” of a “Free Iran,” Khosrowshahi explained, “If you look at the potential GDP of the country… As a marketplace, I think, Uber and pretty much every single other major technology company and services company and brand company, would look at Iran as a very, very significant new market to come into. So I think that we would absolutely come into Iran and invest aggressively in the local marketplace as well.”

“There are thousands and thousands of Iranian-American entrepreneurs like myself and you out there, and it’s a force to be reckoned with,” Khosrowshahi continued. “And when Iran opens up, I’m really looking forward to putting that good force to work, so to speak.”

Pishevar, who has been accused of sexual assault or harassment by at least six women who worked with him, repeatedly stumbled while reading a made-for-TV sales pitch during his lengthy introduction of Khosrowshahi: “The Islamic Republic tried to bury us… But we were seeds. Impenetrable seeds. What comes next is the blooming of the Iranian spirit – bold, beautiful, and unstoppable. Let the world see this: that Iran, once silenced by fear, murder, and rape, rose up in hope, and became a beacon to all nations who dream of liberty. We will no longer fund terrorism, we will fund hope. This is our mission, this is Iranian dynamism. It begins now.”

The Gray Zone for more

by PEPE ESCOBAR

Chinese military hardware stole the show, French ones lost their stock, India’s clout took hits, and Pakistanis crowed. Yet, ultimately, the brief, hot India–Pakistan war was a victory only for the Global North’s divide-and-rule project for the Global South.

For all the alarming seriousness of two South Asian nuclear powers coming to the razor’s edge of a lethal exchange, the 2025 India–Pakistan war could not but contain elements of a Bollywood extravaganza. 

Frantic dancing indeed, which risked getting out of control pretty fast. Forget dodgy, plodding UN mediation or any serious investigation of the suspicious attack out of the blue on tourists in India-held Kashmir. 

Right off the bat, on 7 May, India’s Modi government dramatically launched ‘Operation Sindoor’ against Pakistan, a missile offensive billed as “counter-terrorism.” Pakistan immediately launched a counterpunch codenamed ‘Operation Bunyan al-Marsus’ against the “Indian invasion.”

Culture is key. Sindoor is classic Hindu culture, referring to the vermillion mark applied on the forehead of married women. No wonder the Chinese immediately translated it as ‘Operation Vermillion.’ 

Yet what the whole planet retained from the alarming escalation, irrespective of any attempt at contextualization, not to mention color-coded cultural practices, was the Top Gun element with a Bollywood twist: the Pakistani Air Force (PAF) and the Indian Air Force (IAF), on the night of 7 May, directly involved in the largest, and most high-tech air battle of the young 21^st century, lasting a full hour and featuring scores of 4^th and 4.5generation fighter jets. 

Dramatic entertainment value was provided, quirkily enough, not by Indians, but by a Chinese netizen, notorious internet blogger Hao Gege, and his hilarious global blockbuster parody video “The newly bought plane was shot down.” He was, of course, referring to the IAF’s French Rafales decimated by Chinese J-10C fighters, which have fully mastered electronic warfare and are equipped with cheap, precise, and brutally efficient PL-15 air-to-air missiles. 

Add to it Chinese hardware such as the HQ-9 air defense system and ZDK-03 AWACS. A J-10C, which, incidentally, costs only $40 million, roughly six times less than a Rafale. 

Inevitably, the whole thing turned into a public relations nightmare, not only for New Delhi, but mostly for the French military-industrial complex, complete with a cornucopia of spin from all sides. Islamabad claimed it destroyed six Indian fighter jets (including as many as three Rafales, with a collective price tag of $865 million, plus one Russian Su-30, one MiG-29, and one Israeli Heron UAV); paralyzed 70 percent of India’s power grid; and smashed India’s made-in-Russia S-400 defense system. India, for its part, fiercely denied all of the above over and over again.   

Then, after so much sound and fury, Pakistan on 10 May announced it had won the war. Two days later, India announced the same.  

The Cradle for more

by PETER BACH

The journey from Islamabad to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, is a memorable one. Mine was made over 17 years ago when most folk were fixated on Al Qaeda, though Kashmiri militant group Ansar ur-Tawhid wal Jihad in Kashmir would later support Al Qaeda. As it happened, I was just as interested in the concept of Kashmir belonging to the Kashmiris—not to India, not to Pakistan. Something former Pakistan cricket captain Shahid Afridi also later argued for. Wishing a pear to fall from the ceiling is an old Kashmiri proverb. It means vain hope. Was it really in vain to believe in an independent Kashmir?

I remember winding through the hills of Murree. At Lower Topa, the road becomes Bhurban Road, also called Khakan Abbasi Road, leading to Kohala. From there, you trace the Jhelum River to Muzaffarabad. ‘Kashmir has always been more than a mere place,’ wrote the wonderful journalist, travel writer and historian Jan Morris. ‘It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.’ I recall snowy glaciers. Surprisingly dense forests. A child walking with a raised chair over its head to shelter from the rain. (I filmed this.) Verdant meadows. A loya jirga. (I filmed that too.) Valleys. Gorgeous gorges. Fluent rivers. It was all so beautiful. Lyrical. Not Led Zeppelin lyrical—their song Kashmir was weak by comparison.

I had also wanted to visit Abbottabad south of Kashmir in the Orash Valley but my Pakistani companion had said nothing ever happens there. Of course, Abbottabad was about to become famous not just for its 1850s founder James Abbott of the Bengal Army, who once blew all his money elsewhere on a three-day party with local Hazaras, but as the oddly public hideout of Osama bin Laden—until 14 years ago, almost to the day.

But let’s be clear: it was the British not Al Qaeda who carved out the lines of conflict and violence that still bleed into Kashmir today. Many Kashmiri Brits still tell us this. They also say that unless properly acknowledged, even now, there can be no path to redress.

While India and Pakistan have been ‘trying’ not to nuke each other these past few weeks, I’ve been scouring news on this. Even after the ceasefire and return of villagers to their homes, journalist Yashraj Sharma had noted continued violations by Indian forces along the famous Line of Control (LoC). Pakistani drones were also reportedly abuzz above Srinagar.

Counterpunch for more

by ASHOK KUMAR

A month after Israel began its brutal war on Gaza, Yemen’s Houthis launched a blockade of shipping routes in the Red Sea. The US-led attempt to restore safe navigation was a disaster that has exposed deep fragilities in the global maritime trading system.

On May 12, a New York Times article titled “Why Trump Suddenly Declared Victory Over the Houthi Militia” inadvertently revealed the truth about the US-led coalition’s failure in Yemen. The piece noted that while the United States was burning through munitions, Yemen’s Houthis, or Ansar Allah, continued firing at ships and shooting down drones with impunity.

In other words: Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, successfully imposed a blockade on the Red Sea — one of the most critical shipping lanes in the world — while the US and its allies floundered, wasting billions in missile defense against an opponent that outmaneuvered them at every turn.

US military operations in Yemen have resulted in significant civilian casualties, with starkly conflicting estimates. Airwars, a UK-based conflict monitor, documents hundreds of Yemeni civilian deaths across 181 US military actions since 2002. These figures stand in dramatic contrast to Pentagon reports acknowledging just thirteen civilian fatalities. The broader Yemeni civil war, ongoing since 2014, has proven even more devastating. Independent experts estimate the Saudi-led coalition’s US-backed bombing campaign and blockade have contributed to over 150,000 deaths — part of a conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni lives overall.

How did it end? Three key factors explain the Houthis’ ability to maintain a blockade despite Western opposition: their control of a vital geographic choke point, their domestically produced missile and drone arsenal, and the inherent vulnerabilities of a hyperconsolidated global shipping industry.

The Blockade That Shook the World

On November 19, 2023, Houthi fighters boarded the Israeli-linked Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea, marking the first naval blockade in history imposed by a force without its own navy. From that moment, Yemen effectively corked one of the world’s most vital trade routes, disrupting a third of global container traffic and nearly a quarter of all maritime trade between non-neighboring countries. The economic shock waves were immediate. Shipping giants rerouted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope for the first time in over 150 years, sending transit times, costs, and insurance premiums soaring.

Jacobin for more

by CHRIS HEDGES

IT IS 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s.

A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots.

There will be ‘no way,’ Israel will stop the war, he announced, even if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is ‘destroying more and more houses’ in Gaza. The Palestinians ‘have nowhere to return.’

‘[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,’ he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. ‘But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.’

The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter. It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights.  

The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history.

Newage for more

by JONATHAN COOK

As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up.

Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from western establishments.

Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.

The British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial Times, was first to break ranks last week to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave.

In an editorial – effectively the paper’s voice – the FT accused the United States and Europe of being increasingly “complicit” as Israel made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to genocide, and noted that the goal was to “drive Palestinians from their land”, an allusion to ethnic cleansing.

Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.

So parlous is the state of western reporting, from a media no less complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need to seize on any small signs of progress.

Next, the Economist chimed in, warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers were driven by a “dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding Jewish settlements there”.

At the weekend, the Independent decided the “deafening silence on Gaza” had to end. It was “time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.”

Actually much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been the western press corps and western politicians slumbering through the past 19 months of genocide.

Then on Monday, the supposedly liberal Guardian voiced in its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing “genocide”, though it only dared do so by framing the accusation as a question.

Dissident World for more

by SADAQUE NOOR

The Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, have long faced systematic persecution, statelessness and human rights abuses. Among the myriad challenges confronting this community, the denial of education stands out as a profound injustice with far-reaching consequences.

Its roots are deeply embedded in Myanmar’s society and political landscape. Despite evidence suggesting their presence in the region for centuries, the Rohingya have been systematically marginalised and denied citizenship under Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law. This has rendered them ineligible for many basic rights, including access to formal education.

In the decades following the country’s independence in 1948, successive governments severely restricted the Rohingya’s access to education by limiting enrolment in public schools, segregating Rohingya students, denying them the right to higher education and other policies.

The situation deteriorated further after the 2012 Rakhine State riots, which led to the displacement of thousands and the segregation of communities. Many Rohingya children were confined to internally displaced persons camps, where educational facilities were either non-existent or grossly inadequate.

The crisis escalated dramatically in August 2017 when a brutal military crackdown, described at the time by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, forced more than 1 million Rohingya to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh. This mass exodus had a devastating impact. Children, who constitute a significant portion of the refugee population, found themselves in overcrowded camps with limited access to schooling.

In the immediate aftermath, humanitarian organisations scrambled to establish learning centres within the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. UNICEF reported that, by January 2019, more than 145,000 Rohingya children were attending these centres. However, classes were often conducted in makeshift structures and lacked trained teachers and standardised curricula. Moreover, some centres taught in Burmese, others in English, and a few in the Rohingya language, leading to inconsistencies in learning outcomes.

Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Indonesia

The ongoing educational crisis among Rohingya refugees is exacerbated by the Bangladeshi government, which has imposed restrictions on formal education within the camps, with the aim of preventing Rohingya refugees from settling there permanently. In December 2021,authorities ordered the closure of home-based and community-led schools, affecting approximately 30,000 children. This decision was part of a broader policy to limit educational opportunities and discourage integration.

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres for more