Category: Uncategorized

by AKBAR SHAHID AHMED

The chance of continued peace between Israel and Hamas depends on bigger and more complex decisions that there’s no guarantee Donald Trump will pursue.

The last two years have brought unprecedented horrors in Israel-Palestine: first, the gruesome Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israelis led by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, then Israel’s sweeping and U.S.-enabled devastation of the Gaza Strip. Daily reports of deaths and apparent war crimes have been so overwhelming as to sometimes obscure the reality that the continued conflict and tragedy are a result of choices by individuals — often, choices at the White House.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced the beginnings of a U.S.-brokered peace deal, under which Israel and Hamas will begin freeing Israeli hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7 and detained Palestinians, while Israel will halt its attacks on Gaza. The two parties signed the agreement on Thursday. Hamas is expected to soon release 20 surviving hostages as the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from much of Gaza; celebrations among exhausted victims of the war and others have already begun.

But now, the chance of continued peace depends on bigger and more complex decisions by Trump that there is no guarantee he will pursue. Six months ago, Israel broke the last ceasefire he brokered, escalating the killing of Palestinians and initiating a man-made famine without consequences from the U.S. and with heavy American support.

What the two sides have accepted is the first step of a larger proposition. Beyond releasing captives, the president’s plan envisions beginning the reconstruction of the Palestinian territory, with Israeli operations ending, Hamas disarming and Gaza receiving humanitarian aid at a level it has not seen for months. The vision is widely understood as prioritizing a political win for Trump, but he argued on Truth Social on Wednesday that it benefits all involved: “All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT day.”

It’s a tall order, however. And it could be doomed if the U.S. persists in policy patterns initiated by President Joe Biden, then sustained or even intensified by Trump for close to a year: deference to Netanyahu, disregard for Palestinians and dismissing skeptics of the war strategy in Washington and beyond.

A Blank Check From The U.S.

The United States has unparalleled leverage over Israel’s war effort and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s chief source of funding, weapons and diplomatic backing. U.S. officials have debated how to use that influence throughout the war, and current expectations that a deal can succeed are rooted in the sense that Trump has pressured Netanyahu for peace more than Biden did.

The Biden administration began demanding a truce as the war hit the six-month mark in March 2024 and unveiled its own ceasefire plan that May. Yet U.S. officials repeatedly showed Netanyahu he did not need to fear losing their support. They abandoned their own “red line” for his conduct in the war, ignored recommendations from U.S. government experts and fellow Democrats to limit U.S. arms for Israel, and declined to amplify Israelis’ own calls for Netanyahu to end the war, instead greenlighting another devastating Israeli offensive in Lebanon.

Then Trump won the election. Demanding a ceasefire before his inauguration and hinting at big repercussions otherwise, he secured a deal.

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by SHEIKH JAVED ALI SINDHI

Today, with over a million annual visitors and only 10% of the 1,330-acre site excavated, the museum remains a gateway to a civilization that still holds countless secrets

Today, the anthropogenic materials from 538 hectares or 1,330 acres of land from the Mohenjodaro Archaeological Site have been investigated through Dry Core Drilling (2014), which makes Mohenjodaro one of the largest cities of the Ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Out of this, only 10% of the area has been excavated so far within last 100 years of scientific excavations. The Archaeological Museum of Mohenjodaro was established in 1925. Sir John Marshall writes in his book Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Valley Civilization (London 1931) that:

“Besides carrying out these extensive operations in 1925-6, I was also able, thanks largely to the interest taken in the work by Sir Leslie Wilson-then Governor of Bombay-to get a serviceable road made to Mohenjo-daro from the Railway station at Dokri, and which was more important still-to erect adequate offices, workrooms, and quarters, and a small museum for the housing of antiquities. Accurate plans of the site were also prepared under my direction by Mr A. Francis, of the survey of India, on a scale of 100 feet to the inch, with contours at 5 feet intervals. These plans have been used in compiling the general but more simplified site plan which accompanies this volume.” (p 13)

Parmanand Mewaram (1865-1938) was a prominent Sindhi writer, lexicographer and a journalist. He visited Mohenjodaro Archaeological Site and Museum during Sir John Marshall’s large scale excavations which he carried out there in 1925-26. He published details of his Mohenjodaro visit in a Sindhi book Gul Phul (2 volumes), published between 1925 and 1936. He noted that local people cultivated their crops on Mohenjodaro mounds.

Devi Dayal Mathur was the Head Photographer of the Archaeological Survey of India He took part in the excavations at Mohenjodaro for one season under the supervision of EJH Mackay who carried out excavations at the site between 1927 to 1931.

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by OCIEL ALI LOPEZ

Trump’s belligerent rhetoric has returned, but on the streets of Venezuela the mood is one of calm rather than alarm.

Despite Trump’s fiery rhetoric on Venezuela, daily life on the ground is strikingly ordinary. Markets run as usual, streets bustle. The “panic buying” that once erupted in moments of political standoff has disappeared. Friction with “empire” is no longer a daily topic of conversation—and when it does come up, the tone is one of humor and mockery rather than alarm.

This past weekend in Caracas, reggaeton star Nicky Jam filled a new, modern baseball stadium with thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of fans, showing that life goes on without much concern. Yet, there are also jarring images in the public sphere: videos of tanks being transported on the metro, calls for war drills, soldiers stationed at strategic sites.

On Monday, September 29, President Nicolás Maduro signed a decree declaring a “state of external commotion,” a constitutional measure that can be invoked in the face of foreign threats. Still, none of this causes panic and the impact on everyday life remains unclear. Most Venezuelans have long grown accustomed to conflict and to the recurring specter of an external threat that, militarily speaking, has never materialized.

This everyday calm stands in sharp contrast to developments in the Caribbean Sea, where the U.S. Navy has deployed a fleet of destroyers, amphibious ships, a nuclear submarine, Tomahawk missiles, and advanced radar and remote-operation technology. Ten F-35 fighter jets, the most advanced U.S. military aircraft, are stationed in Puerto Rico, just north of Venezuela.

Worse still, these are not just maneuvers. Trump himself has boasted of recent U.S airstrikes on three small boats—or peñeros, as these artisanal fishing vessels are called—allegedly used to transport narcotics, leaving at least 17 dead. On September 13, Venezuelan fishermen reported that a tuna boat was intercepted and boarded by U.S. Marines. Caracas has denounced repeated U.S. incursions into Venezuelan airspace and waters.

Equally unsettling is Washington’s decision in August to raise the bounty for Maduro’s capture to $50 million dollars—much higher than what was once offered for Bin Laden. By declaring Venezuela a “narco-state,” Washington suggests that its problem is not with one man, but with an entire state structure. Such language implies that dismantling it would require more than a simple “extraction,” as occurred with former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, extradited in 2024.

A Familiar Story

For Venezuelans, however, this rhetoric and military display fall flat for a skeptical public that no longer expects an imminent attack. After all, this is nothing new. In 2015, Democratic President Barack Obama declared Venezuela “an extraordinary and unusual threat.” Under Trump’s first administration, an outright military invasion was openly floated. In 2018, Trump warned that “all options are on the table.” In 2019, Juan Guaidó was recognized as a “parallel president” by more than 50 Western governments, accompanied by daily threats.

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by PAUL HALPERN

Einstein hated standardized testing, but the reasons why will surprise you.

These days, we like to quantify everything, from fitness (number of steps walked) to popularity (number of friends or followers on social media). Genius, however, is notoriously hard to measure.

News reports featuring contemporary individuals able to perform remarkable mental feats inevitably compare them to Einstein and other brilliant minds of the past. Often, such comparison is made using IQ. The trouble is that there is no record of Einstein taking a full IQ test and having it scored objectively by psychologists. It has just been guessed, not measured. Moreover, over the decades there have been many different types of IQ tests, each of which has its own range and scoring criteria. Consequently, any IQ comparison between Einstein and a purported modern-day savant is essentially meaningless.

Einstein himself never liked standardized testing. To evaluate a potential new research assistant, for instance, he preferred reference letters written by scholars that he trusted and other more personal methods. Perhaps his distrust of quantitative measures was fueled by several uncomfortable incidents in his life, including an awkward attempt at a questionnaire written by Thomas Edison.

Edison’s questionnaire tested facts that, in his opinion, an educated person should know. He gave it to job applicants at his company, thinking that a basic knowledge of science and related subjects offered an ideal background for helping develop new products. His philosophy was that practical self-learning was much more important than a university education.

When Einstein embarked on his first visit to America in 1921, Edison sensed competition. After all, long before relativity became a household word, everyone had been in awe of the marvelous achievements of the Wizard of Menlo Park, as Edison was called — dubbed so for the New Jersey community where he had created many of his inventions. From the incandescent light bulb to the phonograph, who could not be impressed by the Wizard’s innovations?

Yet by recasting the laws of nature themselves, clearly Einstein’s wonders overshadowed even Edison’s. Einstein was lauded when measurements of deflected starlight during the 1919 solar eclipse confirmed predictions of his general theory of relativity. By 1921, he was already an international celebrity.

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by MARTIN BARNAY

‘If you want to be a great politician, you need great troubles; petty troubles are for petty politicians.’ So declared Nicolas Sarkozy in 2018, leaping to the defence of his protégé Gérald Darmanin – now Macron’s justice minister, then facing several rape accusations. By his own metric, Sarkozy sits comfortably among the greats of the Fifth Republic. This Thursday, the former president appeared before a Paris magistrates’ court to hear the verdict in his corruption trial, accused of taking millions – perhaps as many as fifty – from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya to bankroll his 2007 presidential campaign.

The proceedings were of rare magnitude: more than a decade of investigation, thirteen defendants including the former head of state, three of his ministers and a handful of high-flying middlemen. A sizeable crowd turned out for the occasion – two courtrooms filled to capacity, with an overflow auditorium showing the session on a giant screen. Among the defendants, Sarkozy sat beside his childhood friend and former Minister for National Identity Brice Hortefeux; behind them, in the public benches, were Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, and three sons, including Louis, a twenty-something New York University graduate and rising star of France’s populist right. Opposite sat representatives of the Libyan state, a civil party in the case, joined by anti-corruption NGOs and families of the victims of UTA Flight 772, brought down over the Ténéré desert, a bombing attributed to Gaddafi’s intelligence services. Conspicuously absent was Ziad Takieddine, the fixer long accused of serving as the main conduit of Libyan funds to Sarkozy’s circle. He had died two days earlier in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, where he was evading an arrest warrant – ‘a bitter coincidence’, remarked the presiding magistrate.

When the sentences came down, they were heavy. Alexandre Djouhri, the Franco-Algerian power broker once thought untouchable, was given six years in prison with an immediate committal order. Sarkozy received five years, with incarceration deferred: he has a few weeks to turn himself in, though at seventy his age makes him eligible for special consideration, to be determined on appeal in six months’ time. At some 400 pages, the judgement is a landmark ruling. Sarkozy stands convicted of criminal conspiracy, with the court affirming that between 2005 and 2007 his entourage maintained clandestine contacts with the Libyan regime. But he was acquitted of the charge of illegal campaign financing: while investigators identified suspect flows of money from Libya, they were unable to prove conclusively that the funds in question had reached the ex-president. The court also dismissed a document long central to the case – a purported note from Gaddafi’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa, dated December 2006, pledging €50 million for Sarkozy’s campaign. First published by Mediapart in 2012, the document was putatively found amid a trove of Takieddine’s personal papers supplied to the press by his ex-wife.

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Senator Bernie Sanders joins Trevor to discuss what the heck is going on in America right now (hint: it’s oligarchy).

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by VIJAY PRASHAD

7 October 2025 will mark the second anniversary of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. At least 66,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during this time – 30 out of every 1,000 people.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

7 October 2025 will mark the second anniversary of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The World Health Organisation’s data page on Palestinian casualties, regularly updated using figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry and UN agencies, shows that around 66,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the last two years – 30 out of every 1,000 people who were living in Gaza (these numbers, however may be too low, as the ministry has often admitted that it has no capacity to keep up with the flow of death and does not know how many people are buried beneath the tonnes of rubble).

The UN children’s agency, UNICEF, calculates that 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or injured. As Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa and a twenty-year veteran at UNICEF, stated:

These children – lives that should never be reduced to numbers – are now part of a long, harrowing list of unimaginable horrors: the grave violations against children, the blockade of aid, the starvation, the constant forced displacement, and the destruction of hospitals, water systems, schools, and homes. In essence, the destruction of life itself in the Gaza Strip.

Beigbeder’s statement was based on an assessment of the facts over the last two years. Indeed, the year before, Commissioner General of the UN’s Palestine agency (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini said that every day, ten children lost one or both legs due to Israel’s bombardment. A few months later, Lisa Doughten of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told the UN Security Council that ‘Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history’. These stories received little to no attention in mainstream media outlets.

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by F.M. SHAKIL

Trump’s Gaza proposal enlists Pakistani forces for a US-led plan to pacify Palestinian resistance and reshape the region’s balance.

Washington is looking to draft Pakistan into a sweeping plan to reshape Gaza under the guise of a 20-point “peace” initiative led by US President Donald Trump. At the heart of the proposal is an International Stabilization Force (ISF) tasked with enforcing “internal stability” in the devastated Palestinian enclave – a euphemism for dismantling resistance and tightening Israeli control.

Trump, standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a September press conference, laid out a scheme to forcibly relocate Palestinians and reconstruct Gaza as a neoliberal outpost he previously branded “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Pakistan’s public backlash builds

Details of the initiative have raised alarm in Pakistan, where any military collaboration with Israel is a red line for the establishment and the population, given that Islamabad does not recognize the state. Public backlash has intensified since revelations surfaced of Pakistan’s potential participation in the ISF, alongside forces from Egypt and Jordan. 

The people of Pakistan would not accept Washington’s plan to deploy joint military forces from “like-minded Islamic countries” to eliminate resistance forces in Gaza. The opinion-makers, intellectuals, and political circles have already questioned the authority of the rulers to enter into a process that is aimed at transforming Palestine into a part of a “Greater Israel.”

Facing mounting domestic scrutiny, Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar revealed in a 30 September press conference that the 20-point plan diverged sharply from what was initially agreed in Washington. His statement came amid growing demands for transparency from political leaders and civil society, many of whom accuse Islamabad of capitulating to Washington’s demands without a national consensus.

Pakistan’s refusal to join the Saudi and UAE-led coalition against the Ansarallah-aligned forces in Yemen still looms large in public memory. In 2015, Islamabad’s parliament voted unanimously to remain neutral, citing the dangers of waging war on a Muslim country and the risks of further sectarian entanglement. That restraint is now being contrasted with the military’s apparent willingness to deploy forces into a conflict zone tightly controlled by Israel.

It is equally important to note that, despite Tel Aviv’s lack of trust in Pakistan’s military establishment and the latter’s threats to target its nuclear assets in solidarity with Iran, it still chose to assign Pakistani forces a leading role in the proposed ISF. This suggests that Pakistan’s military leadership has offered significant, and so far undisclosed, concessions to Washington.

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Nobel Prize for imperialist war and regime change goes to Washington’s Venezuelan puppet María Corina Machado

by ANDREA LOBO

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded its 2025 Peace Prize to the leader of Venezuela’s far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, an event that is as significant as it is sinister. 

The award was announced on October 10 in Oslo, Norway, a country whose wealth, strategic role in NATO, and large military investments position it as a bulwark for imperialist interests in Europe and beyond. 

The award provides a glaring demonstration of the hypocrisy of capitalist public opinion as it is marshaled behind another catastrophic imperialist intervention in Latin America.

There is nothing unprecedented about bestowing the peace prize upon far-right or blood-drenched figures. If “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” as American songwriter, satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer quipped in 1973, the award to Machado hammers another nail into its coffin.

In the years in between, the prize went to mass murderers and war criminals such as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the former Irgun terrorist responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, and Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was responsible for genocidal violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. Barack Obama received the award in 2009, on the eve of launching a major military surge in Afghanistan and as his government was unleashing a wave of drone assassinations. Then as now, the prize served not as a reward to peacemakers, but as a tool for anointing those favored by imperialism and to legitimize war.

The fascist minions of Donald Trump reacted with petty anger over the Norwegian committee’s passing over the US president. The White House issued an initial statement charging that the committee “proved they place politics over peace” in passing over Trump, whom they credited with “the heart of a humanitarian.”

With his record of arming, financing and politically supporting the Gaza genocide and bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, not to mention his murder of unarmed civilians on small boats in the southern Caribbean, Trump was a bit much for even the Nobel committee to swallow. But if they couldn’t give the award to the US organ grinder, they did choose one of his able monkeys in the person of Machado.

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When Maria Corina Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize, “Peace” has lost its meaning.

by MICHELLE ELLNER

When I saw the headline Maria Corina Machado wins the Peace Prize, I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.

If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents. She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.

Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom,” She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.

Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty, and denying its people the right to live with dignity.

This is who Maria Corina Machado really is:

• She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
• She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
• She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narcotrafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
• She pushed for the U.S. sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class.
• She helped construct the so-called “interim government,” a Washington-backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
• She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.
• Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.

Machado was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t “peaceful protests” as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it “resistance.”

She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by U.S. migration policies.

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by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

Heard of Dinkan? No, he’s not another bumbling American diplomat. He’s a mouse. And a god. If you are from God’s Own Country, Dinkan needs no introduction. If you are not from Kerala, meet this super-powerful, super-cute, super-helpful rodent who, in a delicious twist of cosmic irony, ascended from comic strip to deity status faster than you could say “cheese”.

Dinkan springs, cheekily, from the pages of Balamangalam, a beloved comic periodical published by the Kottayam-based Mangalam Publications until 2012. The character was created by the story-writer N. Somasekharan and the artist Baby in 1983. Even after the publication’s closure, fans created quotable wisdom—sharp, satirical responses to social absurdities—and formed motley groups around Dinkan’s “teachings”. Soon, a curious phenomenon emerged: Dinkoism, which many called Kerala’s most honest religion, started in 2008 by a group of rationalists.

The premise was devastatingly simple. Why should anything not become divine? As Voltaire reportedly observed, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Dinkan’s disciples inverted this warning, wielding absurdity itself as a vaccination against dangerous certainties. Devotion, they demonstrated, requires merely followers, texts, and testimonials of miraculous intervention. Within this framework, Mickey Mouse or Thor could command equal reverence—if the worship fostered peace and compassion.

A few years ago, in 2018, I profiled this anthropomorphic superhero mouse. This was when Dinkoism was trending. Like many, I had recognised its surgical precision as cultural critique. Dinkoism functioned as a clever deployment of divinity to dissect organised religion’s contradictions. Followers understood their assignment perfectly, organising gatherings—digital and physical—that exposed religious orthodoxy’s cracks with the enthusiasm of archaeologists discovering forbidden artefacts. They reminded people about faith’s absurdities, how brainwashing operates, and why rationality matters when confronting religion, spirituality, culture, and tradition’s sensitive territories.

Dinkan was a sensation for a few years. Hundreds attended Kerala’s conclave of the mock religion in Kozhikode in 2016. But over the years, Dinkoism lost momentum. Yet, I still encounter Dinkan’s suktas—the mouse’s sacred sayings—whenever organised religion’s vagaries surface online or in conversations with friends frustrated by religion’s dysfunction, its alarming divisions, and hatred-triggering mechanisms.

There’s an interesting facet about Dinkoism worth highlighting—most Dinkan devotees were, predictably, atheists, rationalists, and agnostics who recognised opportunity in their cartoon deity. They found a chance to construct counter-movements against organised religion’s hegemony. Dinkan held a mirror to society, demonstrating that anything can achieve godhood.

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