Chile’s transfeminist movement faces an uncertain future after a decade of achievements, breakthroughs, and creative political strategies. We are living in a time that demands deep reflection in order to avoid caving to the opacity of the present.
Feminist fervor erupted in Chile during what became known as “Feminist May” in 2018. That uprising, led by thousands of university students, grew to include the occupation of over 20 universities across the country and mass demonstrations to publicly condemn the violence and sexual harassment we experience at the hands of authorities, professors, and our male peers.
Since then, feminists have undergone intense processes of politicization and mass mobilization in the context of a broad, creative, and diverse movement. We have forged new paths to reorganize the struggle in the face of the “top-down” shutdown of the 2019 uprising and the double standards of Chilean progressivism.
Today, we are taking stock and talking amongst one another. We come from different organizing experiences in Chile but share common ground rooted in feminist and anti-patriarchal practice.
Mohammed Robin left his home one morning to go to work, and when he came back he found it had been taken over by Israeli settlers.
The property, near the West Bank City of Ramallah, had been in his family since 1952.
‘I have to go the legal route to defend my land, but even with a legal process… there’s not much chance,’ he says.
Settler encroachment is one of the most important issues in the West Bank at the moment, and it’s worsened since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Sky’s Stuart Ramsay went inside the West Bank and spoke to the Israeli military, armed settlers and the Palestinians being forced from their homes.
Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah in Denmark in 2025. IMAGE/Hreinn Gudlaugsson/Wikimedia Commons
ZANZIBAR
has long been an island of arrivals for traders, sailors, slaves and,
more recently, waves of tourists. I arrived as a wedding guest and a
reader of the Zanzibar-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, in search of the
literary and emotional landscapes that shape his fiction. For a week, I
was part of the tourist economy of this East African island, passively
complicit in its curated pleasures.
For all its beautiful images on social media, Zanzibar is a site of difficult memory. It was once a central node in the Indian Ocean slave trade,
so its past is carved into the coral-stone buildings that reflect a
complex fusion of Swahili, Indian, Arab and European influences in
architecture and town planning.
Zanzibar’s tourist attraction, Stone Tow,n from the air. IMAGE/Wegmann/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
A visit to the Old Slave Market
was sobering. You cannot look away once you’ve seen it. And yet,
Zanzibar is now overlaid with carefully packaged experiences: boutique
hotels with infinity pools, beach picnics with imported champagne,
stalls of “African” art mass-produced for western eyes. The art has
become so generic that it hurts. All the curio markets on the island
look the same.
Even the language has been commodified. Everyone is selling
something. Everyone is searching. “Jambo,” (Hello) say mostly young men
offering one service or another. “Hakuna matata.” (No worries.) “Pole
pole.” (No rush.) These cheerful Kiswahili phrases made famous by the likes of the Lion King movie are repeated like slogans and feel soulless.
Most of the cars on the roads operate as taxis with stickers that
say: Private Hire. The tuk tuks, three-wheeled tricycles, weave in and
out of traffic because movement is an act of constant negotiation, part
of a tourist infrastructure that operates as a regulated service.
The tourist markets of Stone Town. IMAGE/Rod Waddington/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Amid the hum of engines and the ceaseless choreography of traffic, I
kept searching not just for respite from the heat or wifi or good
coffee, but for something literary. I was looking for the celebrated
writer Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Not the man (he hasn’t lived in Zanzibar for decades), but the essence
of his writing, informed by this place: the ache of exile, the weight of
history, the restless question of belonging he grapples with.
U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Leland D. Blanchard II, the Adjutant General of the District of Columbia Army National Guard, visits with soldiers assigned to the 273rd Military Police Company, during patrol operations at the National Mall, August 12, 2025. IMAGE/Staff Sgt. Deonte Rowell/U.S. Army /ABC News
So here’s what I don’t get, he’s [Trump] been sitting on
the Epstein Files this whole time and every time someone brings it up
there’s suddenly some kind of brand new emergency: Putin gets to keep
part of Ukraine, job numbers are “fake,” let’s investigate Letitia
James, investigate Jack Smith. It’s like, Dude, just release the files.
If your name’s not in there, you’d think you’d want everybody to see
them, right? But instead, it’s constant shiny distractions, while the
one thing that matters just stays locked up. Look, man, if you still
think he’s playing 4D chess, I hate to break it to you, but the guy’s
barely playing checkers and he’s eating the pieces. I mean, c’mon, how
much horseshit before you realize your Alpha Male is just an 80-year-old
dude with early dementia spray-tanning his face at 3 AM while rage
tweeting about Rosie.
– Joe Rogan
+ As a naive country kid from the glacier-smoothed farmlands of
central Indiana, I arrived in DC in 1977, lived in the District through
1982 and commuted back there to work from Baltimore for another year.
DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in
the 70s and 80s than it is now that it’s been almost completely
gentrified. I didn’t have a car, so I rode the Metro, took the bus, or
walked everywhere. I went all over town at all hours, from Tenley Circle
to Adams Morgan to Anacostia, often late at night going to clubs to
hear bands, going to and from the libraries at Georgetown or Catholic
because AU’s was so shitty, working at Blues Alley and a movie theater
deep down Connecticut Avenue, and later giving talks and attending
organizing meetings for the Freeze Campaign. I never felt threatened,
frightened or compelled to look over my shoulder. Never got “mugged,”
saw anyone get “mugged” or knew anyone who’d been “mugged”–not in DC.
Back home in Indy, yes. In Manhattan, sure. Not in the District. I’m not
saying there wasn’t violent crime in DC. Of course, there was. There
were hundreds of thousands of people, squeezed together, in a relatively
small area, where extremes of wealth and poverty collided every day.
There was bound to be friction. Maybe there should have been more of it,
given the precarious circumstances many DC residents were compelled to
live in. I’m saying I was never haunted by the prospect of being
stuck-up, robbed, shot or stabbed. I went wherever I wanted to go,
freely.
In all of those hundreds of trips downtown, I had two “violent”
encounters. As a freshman at AU, I was aggressively propositioned in the
bathroom of the Rayburn Building by a staffer for a Georgia
congressman, who then stalked me back on campus and made harassing and
obscene calls to the dorm phone at Hughes Hall for a couple of weeks.
The second incident occurred six years later, when I was grabbed from
behind, thrown to the sidewalk and kicked repeatedly by two Caucasian
men in trench coats after giving a talk at GW against the Reagan arms
buildup. They didn’t take my wallet, but they did warn me to “keep my
fucking mouth shut.”
After nearly two years of Israel’s Western-backed genocide, the peoples of the Arab and Muslim world are seething with anger, yet there are few overt signs of a popular uprising in Arab states that are ruled by pro-Washington autocrats.
As more and more Palestinian children die of starvation in Gaza, can those autocrats survive? Might we be on the cusp of a massive anti-Western uprising in West Asia?
To explore these questions, Dimitri Lascaris speaks with Vijay Prashad.
Vijay is a historian and journalist, and the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is also the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the author of forty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, written with Noam Chomsky.
Vijay and Dimitri also discussed Israel’s growing instability and vulnerability, as well as military cooperation between Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan and North Korea.
“Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, at the start of a five-day trip to Pakistan commencing September 19, 1960, and Pakistani President Ayub Khan, ride through Abdullah Haroon Road (old Victoria Road) in Karachi in a Cadillac convertible after the signing of the historic Indus Waters Basin Treaty, with Eugene R. Black, President of the World Bank as the main witness.” IMAGE/TEXT/PID/Dawn
The Indus Waters Treaty has been a failure — scientific, environmental and socioeconomic. It stood on a pillar made of political sand, which has collapsed. Let us brace ourselves for the reality that the IWT is no more; let’s rejoice and move on with the opportunities this situation has brought.
Surprisingly, neither India nor Pakistan was facing water shortages
when the treaty negotiations started. It was triggered through political
prejudice alone — India shut down the canals emanating from the head
works now under its control (after Partition) but feeding irrigated land
in Pakistan. It was a war crime according to the Rome Statute. The
dispute was immediately hijacked by players of the Cold War. It was seen
as an opportunity to prevent India from drifting into the communist
bloc and Pakistan from becoming another Korea — were war to break out
over the Kashmir dispute.
Based on this premise, David E. Lilienthal, the former head of
Tennessee Valley Authority, proposed a ‘solution’ and wrote to Eugene
Black, president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD), that there were business opportunities for the bank
in the implementation of his proposal regarding the Indus Basin.
Lilienthal’s solution, however, defied science. First, it suggested
that both countries build infrastructure to prevent the river waters
from reaching the sea — a death sentence for the world’s sixth largest
mangrove forest and the Indus Delta, which is an environmental system of
global significance. Second, it supported an illusion of greening the
deserts through canals.
The IWT allowed the complete shutting down of three large rivers,
with no provision of environmental flows downstream, which was
unprecedented. The final nail in the coffin was driven by letting India
dispose of unlimited contaminants into the empty riverbeds of the Ravi
and Sutlej flowing into Pakistan.
Neither India nor Pakistan was facing water shortages when the treaty negotiations started.
International water treaties are negotiated to safeguard the rights
of lower riparian jurisdictions. Primarily, a treaty is needed to
protect a lower riparian from excessive diversions upstream, which may
reduce the flow downstream; extreme damming upstream, which disrupts the
natural rhythms of flow downstream; and dumping polluted waste
upstream, which contaminates the water quality and impacts the
environment downstream.
Transliteration and a rough translation (with notes) of a beautiful Pakistani song in Punjabi sung by YashalShahid. Her highly sorrowful and powerful voice conveys the grief of desertion by her lover. She has composed the above version herself.
The song is written by Sibtain Khalid who composed its music, and sang this song in March, 2017.
Tere dhoke ne (lyrics)
tere dhoke ne sajnA meiN nu mAr mookAya / meiN mar te gayiAN phir sAh kiyooN ae AyA
jag nu ravAyA, meiN tenu hasAyA / phir vi pale kuchh nayuN AyA
teri yAdAN sahAre meiN jee te lavAN gi / ae zehr judAee dA pee te lavAN gi
ek gham tu see ditA, sau gham Ap pAle / sab kitA see apnA tere hawAle
hoohN rAtAN nu yAdAN dee chhAve beh ke / meiN tasbih karAN terA nAN le ke
thak gaiyAN sAre meiN dukhDe seh ke / Ave gA muD ke gayA si tu keh ke
meri banjar akhyAN vich sAvan lawAyA /te mein hanjwaN di bArish vich piyAr bahAyA
tere dhoke ne sajnA meiN nu mAr mookAya / meiN mar te gayiAN phir sAh kiyooN ae AyA
Your betrayal (translation)
your betrayal has killed me, my love / I’m dead, so why am I still breathing, my love? <1>
I made the world cry but with smiles I graced you / yet, I didn’t gain anything from you <2>
with the aid of your memories, survive I will / the poison of separation too, drink I will
hundreds more I sprouted from the grief you gave / everything of mine, to you I gave <3>
at night, sitting under the shade of memories’ flame / using rosary, I recite your name
all the suffering that befell has exhausted me / you’ll return is what you had told me
my barren eyes are filled with the Saavan you brought / I let my love swept away in the tear-rainfall you brought <4>
your betrayal has killed me, my love / I’m dead, so why am I still breathing, my love?
Notes
<1> Its’ as if the person is saying: “I am a dead woman walking” — not in the sense of a prisoner being taken to be executed — but like a living corpse who has no desires or hopes. A person who is buried alive under the weight of her sweetheart’s treachery.
<2> That is, I fought and stood up against the world who was opposed to our union, to make you feel that you are not alone — you have someone by your side all the time.
<3> The grief of betrayal gave rise to many more sorrows, such as depression, loneliness, taunts and ostracism from the people I went against for you, and so on. Everything that belonged to me, including my existence, I gave it to you.
<4> The word “banjar,” common to several South Asian languages, means “infertile,” “unproductive land,” “barren,” etc. So if the barrenness has been filled with water, that is tears, the betrayed one should be thankful but that is not the case, and it shouldn’t be. I don’t know what the writer had in mind by using the word “banjar” here.
The Monsoon season lasts from June to September in the Indian subcontinent. The second month of rainfall, July 15 to August 15, is called Saavan.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
Expect an imperfect deal by end of Q2 As Europe runs low on weapons, Ukraine on fighters, the U.S. on patience, and transatlantic unity frays, President Zelenskyy will likely be forced to accept a negotiated settlement with Russia sometime this year that freezes the fighting but stops short of a comprehensive peace agreement. Putin’s losses are also far from sustainable. At its current rate of gain, Russia will control all of Ukraine in about…118 years. So Putin will aim to cut a deal that is favorable to his overall goal to eventually control Kyiv. 2025 was always going to be the year of negotiation, and the endgame is here.
But will it last? The durability of any settlement will depend on: (1) how satisfied President Putin is with Ukrainian and Western concessions (did he get enough of what he wanted?). Both sides need a deal they can defend politically. And (2) the strength of the security promises underwriting it (are they sufficient to deter further aggression and allow Ukraine to rebuild with confidence?). These are in direct tension; the weaker the security promises, the more concessions Ukraine will have to swallow—neutrality, demilitarization, disarmament, territory, etc.—or risk a return to fighting.
Generally, we see 4 possible outcomes, each with parallels to other countries today:
Odds: 15% Best case – “South Korea” President Zelenskyy will get neither NATO membership nor the full restoration of Ukraine’s territory. However, if he can secure an in-country European tripwire force backstopped by an American security promise on assistance and intelligence support, then the 80 percent of Ukraine still under Kyiv’s control will be set on a much more stable, prosperous, and democratic trajectory. The West’s decision to leverage the approximately $300 billion it has frozen in Russian sovereign assets would also get reconstruction in Ukraine off to a good start.
OpenAI scrambles to remove personal ChatGPT conversations from Google results.
Faced with mounting backlash, OpenAI removed a controversial ChatGPT
feature that caused some users to unintentionally allow their
private—and highly personal—chats to appear in search results.
Fast Company exposed the privacy issue on Wednesday, reporting
that thousands of ChatGPT conversations were found in Google search
results and likely only represented a sample of chats “visible to
millions.” While the indexing did not include identifying information
about the ChatGPT users, some of their chats did share personal
details—like highly specific descriptions of interpersonal relationships
with friends and family members—perhaps making it possible to identify
them, Fast Company found.
OpenAI’s chief information security officer, Dane Stuckey, explained on X that all users whose chats were exposed opted in to indexing their chats by clicking a box after choosing to share a chat.
Fast Company noted that users often share chats on WhatsApp or select
the option to save a link to visit the chat later. But as Fast Company
explained, users may have been misled into sharing chats due to how the
text was formatted:
“When users clicked ‘Share,’ they were presented with an option to
tick a box labeled ‘Make this chat discoverable.’ Beneath that, in
smaller, lighter text, was a caveat explaining that the chat could then
appear in search engine results.”
IMAGE/ChatGPT Share box via DaneStuckey on X
At first, OpenAI defended the labeling as “sufficiently clear,” Fast Company reported
Thursday. But Stuckey confirmed that “ultimately,” the AI company
decided that the feature “introduced too many opportunities for folks to
accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.” According to Fast
Company, that included chats about their drug use, sex lives, mental
health, and traumatic experiences.
Carissa Veliz, an AI ethicist at the University of Oxford, told Fast
Company she was “shocked” that Google was logging “these extremely
sensitive conversations.”
