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by ANN FOSTER

Sent by Louis XIV, the filles du roi were sent to North America to birth new generations of colonists and help conquer the land.

On September 22, 1663, thirty-six young women arrived in a French colony on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in a region that we now call eastern Canada. While the men of the colony greeted them eagerly, the women were whisked away by an order of nuns already living in the area. These sisters would protect and train the women for their calling as wives and mothers, soon to be matriarchs of all New France, as it was then known. Over the next decade, hundreds more women would make this transatlantic journey, and nearly all remained to marry and bear children. They turned the fur trading colonies into self-sustaining settlements that formed the basis for present-day Quebec.

Today, two-thirds of all Canadians of French descent can trace their lineage to one of these women, widely known as the filles du roi or the King’s Daughters. The name was coined by Marguerite Bourgeoys, founder of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal, and referred to the dowries that a small percentage of them were provided from Louis XIV, as the king might have given his own daughters. These women and girls, some as young as fourteen, had been recruited for their purported fertility, hardiness, and moral character. They were to become the mothers of a new generation of colonists whose presence in that region of North America would cement France’s dominion over it. If the act of conquering land was men’s domain, the king needed women to create emotional and physical connections to the land itself, ensuring these regions remained under French control.

The challenge facing the king was that the French men already sent to settle parts of New France had mostly become itinerant fur traders. Without a reason to return to one place, such as running a farm or visiting a family, settlements were failing to thrive and were at risk of being lost to the nearby Iroquois or British. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister and advisor, took measures to ensure that wouldn’t happen. In 1670, he issued an edict threatening to rescind hunting licenses and other privileges of unmarried French settlers. Colbert was also aware that a century earlier, the British had successfully implemented a program similar to what became the filles du roi in the Virginia colony. He designed filles du roi in partnership with Jean Talon, the great Intendant of Quebec. Colbert oversaw financing and recruitment for the program while Talon supervised the women upon arrival and saw to it that each was successfully married off.

The newly arrived women had to be able to endure relative isolation, survive winters harsher than they were used to in France, and possess the constitution to bear numerous children. It seems an unlikely option to appeal to many, but the opportunities becoming one of the filles could provide were alluring, particularly among the residents of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, which served more as an asylum or prison at the time. Some scholars suggest that many of the filles were sex workers, likely due to the Salpêtrière’s later reputation for housing women arrested as such. As Aimie Kathleen Runyan writes, during the time of the filles du roi program, the Salpêtrière provided housing to women and girls suffering from health conditions as well as to orphans, the homeless, and female criminals. The sisters who ran the hospital required a strong work ethic of its residents. Those healthy enough were put through a daily regimen of religious education and physical schooling intended to train them to be pious and obedient. The sisters were familiar with each resident and recommended only those they felt could succeed in Quebec.

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by SUNIL PANT

The language, symbols and identities of Pride are exported globally – and trapped in limited Western ideals. For true liberation, we must look to Indigenous and Asian cultures, argues Sunil Pant

Every June, rainbow flags bloom like seasonal flowers. ‘Pride Month’ marks the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City but now arrives with sponsored parades, social media campaigns, and institutional performances of allyship around the globe. An important moment of US community resistance has been elevated into the defining myth of global LGBTQIA+ liberation. It is not a good fit. 

In Nepal – as in India, Mexico, Samoa, or Indonesia – our expressions of queerness and liberation did not begin in 1969. Centuries ago, laws imposed by colonial forces criminalised our same-sex relationships, multiple gender identities and varied family structures. After the British boots came American evangelism. Now, INGO, UN, foundation and corporate donor funding are locked into a Western script that continues to erase and restrict diverse identities and forms of resistance.

US and European organisations tell us what liberation should look like, what flags to carry, when to celebrate (even when June brings heatwaves and monsoons), and how to define ourselves – while ignoring local queer traditions, rituals, and festivals. This is not global solidarity. It is soft colonialism.

That tragedy is not only ours to bear. By flattening global queer expression into one Western script, queer people in the global north close their minds to older, more fluid and more inclusive ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. 

Where do hijra, kothi, fa’afafine, muxe, bissu, or ashtime fit into ‘LGBTQIA+’? These are not sub-identities or exotic footnotes captured under English terms with a ‘+’ or a ‘*’. They are sovereign gender categories with spiritual and social depth. For those able to think beyond borders and binaries, they can be a pathway to more liberated futures.

Understanding gender

In many Indigenous and Asian cultures – including ancient Nepalese, South Asian, Native American, Polynesian, and Buddhist traditions – gender is not a fixed, exclusive identity. It is a journey: a natural unfolding or relational reality rooted in body, mind, spirit, and community.

In matriarchal times, before European-Christian impositions, Nepalese cultures recognised (at least) six or seven genders, including singaru, meti, maruni, vipurushika, nastri, kinnar, and kinnari. Buddhist texts mention five. Dhami and Jhankris spiritual healers were traditionally gender-diverse – neither man nor woman; neither ‘cis’ nor ‘trans’. 

Gender variance is embedded in our sacred art and temple carvings. During Ropain Jatra, the rice-planting festival, men dress as women; at Rateuli, a women-only celebration of marriage, some women dress as men. At the Gaijatra festival, celebrated for centuries, gender and sexual minorities still use satire to speak truth to power. 

Red Pepper for more

Dr. Eqbal Ahmad gave this speech on November 4, 1975 at the University of Michigan during the closing session of the three-day “Bicentennial Dilemma: Who’s in Control?” teach-in.

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LE MONDE

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French historian who has traveled to the Gaza Strip many times over the years, spent a month in the Palestinian territory from December to January. He answered questions from Le Monde’s readers about what he saw there.

Between December 19, 2024, and January 21, 2025, French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, who writes a weekly column on the Middle East in Le Monde, was able to go to the Gaza Strip. The professor at Sciences Po university is publishing his eyewitness account in a book, Un historien à Gaza (“A Historian in Gaza”), set to be released this week in French.

On Monday, May 26, Filiu answered questions from Le Monde‘s readers. Here is a translation of the Q&A originally published in a liveblog in French.

Menton: What event shocked you the most during your time in Gaza?

I was in Gaza from December 19, 2024, to February 21, 2025 – a full month of open hostilities, plus two days of truce. The paradox is that the most violent days were those preceding the truce coming into effect, on January 19. The Israelis intensified the bombings, sometimes very close to where I was staying, while the outside world had been celebrating the announcement of a ceasefire since January 15. The most shocking thing I experienced is the gap between the ordeals experienced in Gaza and the outside world’s perception.

Empathie: How are orphans being cared for in Gaza at the moment? Is there any estimate of their numbers?

The tragedy of Gaza’s orphans is one of the worst disasters unfolding within the broader tragedy of the besieged enclave. The number of orphans is the subject of much debate due to the collapse of the health system and the disappearance of entire families, sometimes with only one surviving child. The society, which I once knew to be so protective within its family structures, has itself collapsed under the weight of widespread slaughter and repeated displacements. Wounded orphans are left abandoned in hospitals with no relatives, not even distant ones, coming to claim them. Bands of street children haunt public dumps, scavenging nylon and wood to resell as fuel.

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by PETER SCHWARZ

On the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz endorsed Israel’s attack on Iran in an interview with public broadcaster ZDF. He said, “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us. I can only say that I have the utmost respect for the Israeli army and the Israeli leadership for having had the courage to do this.”

In another interview with the ARD public broadcaster, Merz advocated violent regime change in Tehran. “It would be good if this regime came to an end,” he said. If the Iranian regime is not prepared to enter into talks, then “Israel will go all the way.” 

Merz is saying more than he intended. His statement that Israel is doing “the dirty work for all of us” exposes the official propaganda of the government and the media justifying the genocide in Gaza and the attack on Iran as shameless lies. This is not about protecting Jewish life or Israel’s “right to exist,” but about subjugating the entire Middle East to imperialist control.

Trump, Merz, Starmer, Macron, and other imperialist leaders behave like mafia bosses, threatening Ayatollah Khamenei and other Iranian leaders with murder, the use of bunker-busting weapons, and even nuclear bombs. Israel, meanwhile, is responsible for the “dirty work” reserved for the lowest level of the mafia hierarchy, the picciotti: the underhanded assassination of high-ranking military personnel and scientists, the bombing of residential areas and infrastructure, and the terrorisation of the population.

World Socialist Web Site for more

by AMY GOODMAN, JUAN GONZALES & JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

What is MAGA imperialism? Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster says that, despite its feints toward anti-imperialist isolationism, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has coalesced into a “hyper-nationalist” form of populism that rejects the U.S.’s post-WWII adherence to liberal internationalism and promotes dominance over other countries via military power rather than through economic globalization. Foster explains that this “Trump doctrine is opposed to multi-ethnic empires and multi-ethnic nations,” operating under a “racial definition of foreign policy, with the notion that the United States is a white country and other ethnicities don’t belong.” And while some analyses of the Trump coalition locate its base in the “white working class,” in reality this ideology is rooted in the lower middle class, which owns more property and is less opposed to the wealthy capitalist class. “If you go back to the 1930s, to Italy and Germany, it’s the same constituency that drove the fascist movement, but it’s a result of an alliance between big capital… and the lower middle class.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Trump announced on social media Monday a new round of threatened tariffs, ranging from 25 to 40% on imports from 14 countries, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, set to take effect August 1st, barring new deals. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an additional 10% tariff on countries that align themselves with the BRICS group of nations, led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Trump cited the group’s, quote, “anti-American policies.” The threat came as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva kicked off a two-day BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro.

PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] So, we don’t want an emperor. Our countries are sovereign. If Trump issues tariffs, other countries have the right to do the same. There is the reciprocity law. I think it’s not responsible for a president from a country like the United States to threaten the world with tariffs on social media. Honestly, there are other forums for the president of a country the size of the United States to talk to other countries.

AG: : This comes as Vice President JD Vance has been promoting Trump’s new foreign policy approach. Vance addressed the Ohio Republican Party last month.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: What I call the Trump doctrine is quite simple. Number one, you articulate a clear American interest. And that’s, in this case, that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. Number two, you try to aggressively, diplomatically solve that problem. And number three, when you can’t solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there, before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.

AG: For more, we’re joined by John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, editor of the Monthly Review, where his new article is headlined “The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism.”

Well, why don’t you lay out your thesis for us, professor John Bellamy Foster? And welcome to Democracy Now!

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, thank you.

The Trump doctrine was articulated in the first Trump administration. Normally, the presidential doctrines are determined by the press, who see the administrations operating in a certain way, according to a certain principle, and they designate that as a doctrine. The Trump administration has been different. There was a lot of confusion about Trump foreign policy. Was it–was it isolationist? Was it anti-imperialist?

In the first Trump administration, Michael Anton, who is one of the main MAGAideologues and came from the Claremont Institute, which is one of the primary MAGA institutions, was in the National Security Council, and they basically had him leave the National Security Council in order to formally articulate a Trump doctrine that the media would take seriously and foreign policy experts would take seriously. So, he gave a lecture. He was appointed at Hillsdale College, which is a MAGAinstitution, and he gave a lecture at Princeton University, where he articulated the Trump doctrine, and then that was published in Foreign Policy, the leading foreign policy journal in the United States. And the Trump doctrine is said–and now Michael Anton is the deputy–well, he’s the director of policy planning for the State Department, so he’s the main idea man, essentially assistant secretary of state. He’s the main idea man in the State Department. And he articulated, on behalf of Trump, a doctrine, a Trump doctrine, with four pillars.

The first one was national populism, which is the way in which the MAGA movement designates itself, sort of a neofascist designation, as it resonates with the National Socialism of the Nazi movement. But national populism is the first pillar.

The second pillar is that all nations should be primarily nationalistic in their orientation.

The third one is the opposition to liberal internationalism and to the liberal hegemony of the United States over the world order that was established after the Second World War and has continued to this day. Instead, what is defined is a hyper-nationalist “America first” imperium, where the United States essentially rules the world on its own.

But the fourth pillar is the most important. And Anton went back to Aristotle, who said there were two–three forms of political organization: the tribe or ethnicity, the city-state or the state, and the empire. And empires are defined as multi-ethnic. And the Trump doctrine is opposed to multi-ethnic empires and multi-ethnic nations, and argues that we should–we should determine our foreign policy by ethnicity and, essentially, the tribe. In fact, it’s a racial definition of foreign policy, with the notion that the United States is a white country, and other ethnicities don’t belong, and we’re going to organize our foreign policy, as well as our domestic policy, on that basis.

So, the Trump doctrine was very important. Remember, Anton is now the number one policymaker within the State Department, so this is not a secondary matter.

Monthly Review Online for more

by RIYAD A. SHAHJAHAN & MICHALINOS ZEMBYLAS

Harvard University is under siege by the Trump administration – and the world is watching. But this case isn’t just an American issue.

It’s part of a global trend: universities cast as enemies and institutions in need of reform. Populist, right-wing governments are blaming universities for tearing at the fabric of nations.

These attacks are part of a broader strategy known as affective nationalism. It occurs when leaders use emotions, not just ideas, to build national identity. Feelings such as fear, pride, nostalgia and resentment are deployed to create a story about who belongs, who doesn’t and who’s to blame.

As scholars who study nationalism, emotion and higher education, we explore the emotional politics behind these attacks.

Global backlash

Much of President Donald Trump’s vision and rhetoric is inspired by Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has waged a culture war on higher education for over a decade, banning gender studies and reshaping university governance. Orbán’s attacks on Central European University expose his hostility to academic freedom, critical thinking and diversity. All are viewed as threats to his nationalist “illiberal democracy.”

Trump followed Orbán’s playbook. On May 22, 2025, his administration declared that Harvard could no longer enroll foreign students. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security statement claimed that university leaders “created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators.” The statement suggested that many of the so-called agitators were foreign students.

Similarly, in India, students at Jawaharlal Nehru University were labeled “anti-national” for protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which provides fast-track citizenship to non-Muslim refugees. The students argued that it marginalizes Muslims. Since 2016, the Modi government has increasingly used “anti-national” and sedition charges to silence student and academic dissent.

These labels – “elite,” “foreign” or “anti-national” – are not neutral. They fuel fear, resentment and powerful narratives that frame universities as threats. Harvard, Central European University and Jawaharlal Nehru University have become symbols of broader national anxieties around identity and belonging.

British-Australian feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s work on the sticky nature of emotions helps reveal the two emotions that often appear in attacks on universities: nostalgia and resentment.

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by ALEXANDRA WITZE

Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game, and emerging technologies further threaten the status quo. The result is a risky new nuclear age.

The Doomsday Clock — a symbolic arbiter of how close humanity is to annihilating itself — now sits at 89 seconds to midnight, nearer than it has ever been to signalling our species’ point of no return.

Many threats, including climate change and biological weapons, prompted global-security specialists at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago, Illinois, to move the clock’s hands in January. But chief among those hazards is the growing — and often overlooked — risk of nuclear war.

“The message we keep hearing is that the nuclear risk is over, that that’s an old risk from the cold war,” says Daniel Holz, a physicist at the University of Chicago, who advised on the Doomsday Clock decision. “But when you talk to experts, you get the opposite message — that actually the nuclear risk is very high, and it’s increasing.”

From Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine and the simmering tensions between India and Pakistan that flared in May, to the US and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities in June, the world is not short of conflicts involving one or more nuclear-armed nations.

But it’s not just the number of clashes that have the potential to escalate that are causing consternation. The previous great build-up of nuclear weapons, the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, essentially involved two, reasonably matched superpowers. Now, China is emerging as a third nuclear-armed superpower, North Korea is growing its nuclear arsenal and Iran has enriched uranium beyond what is needed for civilian use. India and Pakistan are also thought to be expanding their nuclear arsenals. Add to this the potential for online misinformation and disinformation to influence leaders or voters in nuclear-armed nations, and for artificial intelligence (AI) to bring uncertainty to military decision-making, and it’s clear that the rulebook has been ripped up.

“Eighty years into the nuclear age, we find ourselves at a reckoning point,” says Alexandra Bell, president and chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Amid this fraught landscape, scientists are working to prevent the world from annihilation. At a three-day conference in Chicago that started on 14 July — almost exactly 80 years after researchers and the US military tested the first atomic weapon — dozens of scientists, including Nobel laureates from a wide array of disciplines, met to discuss actions to prevent nuclear war. They released a fresh warning about its risks, as well as recommendations for what society can do to reduce them, including calling on all nations to speak transparently to each other about the scientific and military implications of AI.

Dawn of a nuclear age

The emerging multipolar world disrupts a tenet of nuclear security that helped to avoid nuclear war in the past. The principles of nuclear deterrence rest on the assumption that no nation wants to start a war that is bound to have devastating consequences for everyone. This meant having distributed nuclear arsenals that couldn’t be taken out with one strike, diminishing any incentive to strike first, in the knowledge the enemy would strike back and the consequence would be ‘mutually assured destruction’. It also meant clarity among nuclear-armed nations about who had what strike capability, and therefore what the possible consequences of any attack might be. A fragile stability prevailed, thanks to backchannel communications between hostile nations and diplomatic signals designed to avoid misunderstandings that could lead to the accidental pressing of the nuclear button.

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by UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Sleep may not just be rest for the mind—it may be essential maintenance for the body’s power supply. A new study by University of Oxford researchers, published in Nature, reveals that the pressure to sleep arises from a build-up of electrical stress in the tiny energy generators inside brain cells.

The discovery offers a physical explanation for the biological drive to sleep and could reshape how scientists think about sleep, aging, and neurological disease.

Led by Professor Gero Miesenböck from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG), and Dr. Raffaele Sarnataro at Oxford’s Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior, the team found that sleep is triggered by the brain’s response to a subtle form of energy imbalance. The key lies in mitochondria—microscopic structures inside cells that use oxygen to convert food into energy.

When the mitochondria of certain sleep-regulating brain cells (studied in fruit flies) become overcharged, they start to leak electrons, producing potentially damaging byproducts known as reactive oxygen species. This leak appears to act as a warning signal that pushes the brain into sleep, restoring equilibrium before damage spreads more widely.

“You don’t want your mitochondria to leak too many electrons,” said Dr. Sarnataro. “When they do, they generate reactive molecules that damage cells.”

The researchers found that specialized neurons act like circuit breakers—measuring this mitochondrial electron leak and triggering sleep when a threshold is crossed. By manipulating the energy handling in these cells—either increasing or decreasing electron flow—the scientists could directly control how much the flies slept.

Even replacing electrons with energy from light (using proteins borrowed from microorganisms) had the same effect: more energy, more leak, more sleep.

Physorg for more