by WALDEN BELLO

A landmark book on a remarkable Asian personality comes out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the passing of Zhou Enlai.

An epic life deserves an epic biography, and Chen Jian provides this for Zhou, who was probably the consummate diplomat of the twentieth century. Chen combs the vast literature on the Chinese revolution as well as primary sources in the archives of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to give us a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the second most important figure in the struggle to free China from imperial domination and feudalism in the twentieth century, one that set the stage for its emergence as an economic superpower in the first quarter of twenty-first.

The world is most familiar with Zhou’s diplomatic performance, especially his role in bringing about the historic visit of President Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972. But probably equally important was his debut on the world stage in 1954-55. He was the central figure in the Geneva Conference of 1954, where he crossed swords with a hostile American delegation led by the arch-anti-Communist John Foster Dulles in an effort to forge a diplomatic settlement of the Korean War. Although he was not able to break the stalemate in that front, he enjoyed success on the second issue at that historic meeting, critically contributing to the formal end of the First Indochina War that saw the political dismantling of the French empire in Southeast Asia after its defeat on the battlefield by the Viet Minh.

After Geneva, Zhou’s most important next stop was Indonesia, where he was key in planting the seeds of the Non-Aligned Movement of countries in the Global South during the historic Bandung Conference in April 1955. His personal warmth and flexibility won over personalities as diverse as the onion-skinned Indian prime minister Nehru, the mercurial Indonesian leader Sukarno, and the pro-American Filipino diplomat Carlos P. Romulo. As a middle school student, Zhou loved acting in plays, and Chen speculates that “if Zhou indeed deserved the accolade as ‘one of the world’s greatest actors’…his performance in stage plays must have enabled him to practice those performing arts that would benefit him tremendously in his political and diplomatic career.”

The French Connection

Like many in his generation, Zhou was radicalized by the efforts of the western powers and Japan to carve up China into spheres of influence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Japan especially was a source of fascination, admired for its successful effort to catch up with the West but hated for its brazen moves to colonize China. Zhou spent a year and a half in Japan, trying to get into a university. Exile politics, however, got in the way of academic commitments, along with difficulties in learning Japanese.

FPIF for more

by ANANYA BHATTACHARYA

Quick commerce promises instant convenience, but it’s driven more by deep discounts and habit-building than real need.

Amazon has placed its bet on a service that has struggled to thrive in the West.

On March 17, the company started testing a 30-minute delivery service in select locations across the U.S, alongside one- and three-hour delivery options across thousands of American cities.

The move marks a renewed push into quick commerce — a model that has struggled to take hold in Western markets.

Amazon hasn’t entered this experiment blind. It has been running a 10-minute delivery service in India since June 2025, and a 15-minute service in the United Arab Emirates since October. Those markets offer a glimpse into both the promise — and the pitfalls — of ultrafast delivery.

China has built the largest quick-commerce market in the world at $125 billion. Around one in four people in China use these services. Around 200 million workers, up to 40% of China’s urban workforce, rely on digital platforms for employment. 

India is inundated with ultrafast delivery services, with standalone apps BlinkIt and Zepto leading the pack. The segment has been one of the most-funded tech startup sectors in the past few years.

Experts believe these platforms have managed to “manufacture” the need for ultrafast deliveries by offering deep discounts rather than solving a real problem.

Companies trained consumers to expect instant fulfillment, whether or not the need was truly urgent.”

“A large part of the category was also manufactured through aggressive subsidy, convenience marketing, and habit formation,” Kartik Hosanagar, a tech and marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told Rest of World. “Companies trained consumers to expect instant fulfillment, whether or not the need was truly urgent.”

Quick commerce accounts for just 1%–2% of all trade in India, even after massive cash burn to increase speed and offer deep discounts. Price discounting in quick commerce is 6%–9%, compared with 2%–5% for general trade, data from management consultancy Kearney shows. India’s quick-commerce market, currently less than a tenth of China’s, has just 12 million gig workers.

Rest of world for more

by B. R. GOWANI

(Warning: some people may find certain words offensive.)

the biggest dick is stuck in the Strait of Hormuz

the pale blue dot's biggest & the 2nd biggest dicks are on the loose
they both have been unrestrained since before they were born!
no exaggeration, they've been fucking around prior to birth
the 2nd one has the entire region as a screwing field
the biggest one has the entire planet as fucking/looting ground

in its region, the 2nd one could screw all except one
the one it couldn't get was the one it wanted by any means
the 2nd one could only do that with the help of the biggest one
the biggest one had joined it once last year but through air only

this time biggest one was very reluctant to get involved
the 2nd biggest one is extremely clever compared to the biggest 
the biggest is surrounded by supporters of the 2nd 
people say the 2nd has secrets about the biggest

the 2nd biggest is trying to blackmail the biggest 
the 2nd has been getting free money from biggest for a long time
the biggest one, for whatever reason, agreed to join the 2nd one
the 2nd biggest said it'll get orgasm from the air only

 so, all alone, the biggest dick penetrated the Strait of Hormuz
aiming to achieve the greatest orgasmic pleasure
the Strait was narrow without any expansion room 
the biggest realized it has gotten stuck in the Strait

the fear of pleasure-less exit was unbearable
but the dread of staying jammed for long, also intolerable
world's biggest dick is cursing the 2nd biggest dick for this dilemma
the biggest could neither stay in and enjoy nor exit and relax
it couldn't summon any other dicks from the 2nd one's region

it had to be a trustworthy dick trusted by involved parties
the current situation is not a pleasant one for the biggest one
 with mediator's help, the biggest is trying to exit the Strait
but the 2nd biggest is pushing the biggest one back in

the 2nd biggest is trying not to let the biggest one egress
one dick is terribly mad and now feels itself irrelevant
that dick thought it was smart being friend of the 2nd biggest  
nevertheless, the dick next door got away with all the limelight

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by JUAN COLE

The Iranian government went 12 rounds with a genocidal Trump—and its people suffered a lot of punches—but the nation is still standing. That counts as a win and a massive failure for the United States..

Trump announced a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday, April 7, the 39th day of the Israeli-US war on Iran. He depended on Pakistani mediators and a 10-point peace plan put forward by Iran itself.

And so, Iran won the 2026 war.

It did not win as in, scoring a knockout. It won in the sense that if I went 12 rounds with Deontay Wilder and was still standing up at the end of it, it would count as a win.

The Israeli-US attempt to decapitate the government failed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated along with family members, but the 88-member clerical Assembly of Experts simply elected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to succeed him. The civilian minister of defense was killed, which is probably a war crime. President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed IRGC General Majid Ebnelreza as acting minister of defense. The pragmatic civilian Secretary of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani was assassinated, likely another war crime. He was succeeded by hard liner Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former IRGC general. In essence, Trump and Netanyahu made an internal coup against Iran’s centrist pragmatists in government, ensuring that they were replaced by far right hard liners.

Going into the war, the Iranian government had just committed a massacre of thousands of protesters and was without a friend in the world. Trump and Netanyahu committed breathtaking war crimes on Iran and acted and spoke so monstrously that many countries ended up at least rhetorically supporting Iran, or at least opposing the war on it. Israel comes out of the war a pariah. The US is too rich, big and powerful to be a pariah but its standing has certainly plummeted and it can expect much less cooperation going forward.

Iran likely inflicted a billion dollars worth of damage on the 13 US military bases in the Middle East, most of which are largely destroyed. It used cheap little drones to take out radar installations in Kuwait and elsewhere worth hundreds of millions of dollars, blinding the US to its missile barrages and allowing some deadly strikes, as on Dimona in Israel. Iran demonstrated that having a US military base does not protect the host country but rather exposes it to greater danger. Most US military personnel appear to have had to flee the bases, relocating to local hotels. Iranian intelligence in the Gulf is good enough so that some of those hotels were attacked by drones. Some personnel arrived back in Washington D.C. with only the clothes on their back and Pete Hegseth doesn’t seem to have helped them much.

Whether Gulf states will want US bases in the medium to long term, after this, is now an open question. And are any US personnel at all left in Iraq? Iraqi Shiites supported Iran in the war.

Israeli military censorship makes it difficult to assess the damage to that country. The Haifa refinery was hit, as were military and intelligence research institutes. Netanyahu was clearly over-confident in Israeli interceptors. Many Israelis have had to move house to sleep in shelters. Moreover, Israel is running out of interceptors faster than Iran is running out of ballistic missiles, so that if the war continued, at some point Israel would be a sitting duck. If Israel actually does agree to abide by Trump’s two-week ceasefire, that is the reason–Israel is days from being completely vulnerable to Iran’s strikes. Already, Arrow interceptors are so low that Israel has had to let some missiles through if they seemed to be headed for relatively unpopulated areas. In that sense, Israel lost on points.

I have argued that the war failed not only because the government still stands but because its annual income from petroleum and new Strait of Hormuz tolls could be several times what it was earning from petroleum sales to China before the war. Petroleum prices are falling from highs because of the two-week ceasefire, which may or not signal the end of the war. But so much supply has been destroyed or delayed in the Gulf that prices could remain high in the coming year. Likely a third of the Gulf’s refining capacity has been damaged.

Common Dreams for more

by TRITA PARSI

Yesterday began with Donald Trump issuing genocidal threats against Iran on social media and ended—just ten hours later—with the announcement of a 14-day ceasefire, on Iran’s terms. Even by the volatile standards of Trump’s presidency, the whiplash is extraordinary. What, then, have the two sides actually agreed to—and what might it mean?

In a subsequent post, Trump asserted that Iran had agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open during the two-week pause in hostilities. Negotiations, he added, will proceed over that period on the basis of Iran’s 10-point plan, which he described as a “workable” foundation for talks.

Those 10 points are:

1. The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.

2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program

4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.

5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.

6. End of all United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.

7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program.

8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.

9. Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.

10. Cease-fire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The United States has not, of course, signed on to all ten points. But the mere fact that Iran’s framework will anchor the negotiations amounts to a significant diplomatic victory for Tehran. More striking still, according to the Associated Press, Iran will retain control of the Strait during the ceasefire and continue—alongside Oman—to collect transit fees from passing vessels. In effect, Washington appears to have conceded that reopening the waterway comes with tacit recognition of Iran’s authority over it.

The geopolitical consequences could be profound. As Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti note in Responsible Statecraft, Tehran is likely to leverage this position to rebuild economic ties with Asian and European partners—countries that once traded extensively with Iran but were driven out of its market over the past 15 years by U.S. sanctions.

Iran’s calculus is not driven solely by solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese. It is also strategic. Continued Israeli bombardment risks reigniting direct confrontation between Israel and Iran—a cycle that has already flared twice since October 7. From Tehran’s perspective, a durable halt to its conflict with Israel is inseparable from ending Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not an aspirational add-on; it is a prerequisite.

Trita Parsi for more

by LISA MULLENNEAUX

‘Steal This Story, Please!’ is a call-to-action for independent media.

A defining moment in Steal This Story, Please!, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s portrait of the journalist and Democracy Now! founder Amy Goodman, comes midway through the film. It’s Election Day in November 2000, and then-President Bill Clinton telephones Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York City with an ask: Can he share a “get out the vote message” with her audience? Seizing her moment, Goodman says yes, then grills him on air for nearly thirty minutes. Clinton accuses her of being combative and adversarial, but it’s clear who’s in charge. 

It’s also clear that Goodman relishes being a thorn in the side of “business as usual” bigwigs. Whereas some journalists would see Clinton’s surprise call as a chance to ingratiate themselves with the most powerful man in America, she uses it to pose the questions others are afraid to ask, such as Clinton’s taking his party “to the right” or that NAFTA was “pushed through” with false promises. That tenacity and fearlessness makes her a unicorn among reporters muzzled by corporate media. In addition to offering a comprehensive look at the events that have shaped her forty-year career, Steal This Story, Please! is also a call to action for people to seek out and support independent news outlets.

After graduating college, Goodman applies for a job at The Phil Donahue Show, but instead joins the news department at WBAI radio in New York City and later travels to East Timor in 1991 to cover the ongoing Indonesian occupation there. Why would Americans need to know about East Timor’s independence movement? Because their tax dollars helped arm and train the Indonesian forces that killed one-third of East Timor’s population over a period of seventeen years—a violent campaign that went largely unreported due to heavy restrictions on media and repression by the Indonesian government. Into this explosive setting, Goodman arrives with her colleague Allan Nairn, and they quickly end up running for their lives at a pro-independence demonstration that becomes a massacre. Steal This Story, Please! includes the now-infamous footage by BBC correspondent Max Stahl that served as a wake-up call to the world. “It’s a day I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” admits Goodman, who, like Nairn, was beaten by Indonesian soldiers. The U.S. government’s collusion with Indonesia against East Timor’s independence, she says, “taught me how critical it is to expose what is done in our name.”

Goodman is a reporter with good running shoes, and she’s proven she will risk anything for a story. In the film’s opening sequence, we see her pursuing P. Wells Griffith III, a Trump policy advisor on climate change, up stairs and through crowded halls at the 2018 U.N. Climate Summit in Poland. He refuses to comment or set up an interview, and eventually shuts a door in her face. When he accuses her of “harassment,” she throws back, “a reporter asking a question, sir, is not harassment.” 

But Goodman isn’t just a reporter; she’s a reporter with a mission. She co-founded her WBAI radio show Democracy Now!  in 1996, she explains in the film, to “bring out the voices of people who are not usually heard.” Those voices include  Moreese Bickham, a Black man from Louisiana Klan country who was wrongfully convicted of a double-homocide and sentenced to death in 1958. After journalist David Isay’s efforts to get the prisoner released fail, he turns to his colleague Goodman and uses her morning show to plead Bickham’s case. “[Governor Edwin Edwards] was getting so many calls from WBAI listeners,” says Isay, “they had to change his phone number.” In video footage from 1996, we see Goodman and Isay welcome Bickham to the WBAI studios in Manhattan after Edwards has been  forced to commute Bickham’s sentence. He had served thirty-seven years. 

Another example of Pacifica Radio’s advocacy was the decision in 1997 to air commentaries “From Death Row” by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Pennsylvania journalist who was sentenced to death for murder in 1982. The idea for the series, Goodman explains, was NPR’s, but it cancelled its planned programming after pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police. She picked up the baton and what WBAI’s audience heard was eye-opening testimony about the nation’s prisons as “social sinkholes of despair,” (in Abu-Jamal’s words). Twelve public radio stations in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey canceled Goodman’s show and for a time its viability was in question. Abu-Jamal remains imprisoned after decades of legal battles.

“Democracy Now!’s strength and singularity,” says Goodman’s current co-host Nermeen Shaikh in the film, “is speaking with people who have no platform. Most media exclude those voices from the frame. We expand the frame, and not just expand it, we center those voices.” Like others interviewed for Steal This Story, Please!, Shaikh explains that Goodman’s fearlessness inspired confidence in a media novice whose audition for the show was live. “I had never been in front of a camera, never read a prompter before I went on air,” she says. “I felt completely terrified, but during the breaks Amy told me I was doing a great job.” 

That kind of self-confidence impressed Jeremy Scahill, who was living and working at the Catholic Worker House in New York City when Goodman hired him in 1996. “I had imagined an entire newsroom of people working to create what I listened to every morning—it was that good. Then it turns out it’s just her,” he explains in the film. Scahill later went on to co-found The Intercept and Drop Site News.

Similarly, journalist Juan Gonzáles was reporting for The New York Daily News when he joined Goodman as co-host that same year because he needed to reach a different audience. After 9/11, his reports on the dangerous air quality at Ground Zero were read on air by Goodman, whose team never left their offices in lower Manhattan. “The only thing I got wrong,” says Gonzáles, “was that it didn’t take twenty years for people to die. It took five years.”

Progressive for more

Who runs the world? Girls! In these matriarchal societies, these aren’t just women-empowering lyrics in a Beyoncé song but a fact of life. Matriarchal societies are those in which women hold positions of power and authority and are the primary decision-makers in both their families and community. While patriarchies have been the norm in most societies throughout history, the following five countries are home to matriarchal societies that show what the world would look like if it were indeed run by women.

1. India’s Khasi Tribe

The state of Meghalaya in northeastern India is home to the Khasi tribe, which is known for its matriarchal society. In the Khasi culture, property and wealth are inherited through the female line, and women have a strong say in household and community decisions. Women are also free to choose their own partners, and divorce is not stigmatized.

2. China’s Mosuo People

The Mosuo people in southwestern China are often referred to as the “last matrilineal society in China.” In this matriarchal society, any property is passed down through the female line, and women are the primary decision-makers in the family. Children are raised by their mothers and maternal uncles, and there is no concept of marriage as we know it. Instead, men and women have relationships known as “walking marriages,” in which they are free to choose their partners and can end the relationship at any time.

3. Indonesia’s Minangkabau People

The Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, Indonesia, have a matriarchal society in which property and wealth are inherited through the female line. Women hold a high status in Minangkabau culture and are often the ones who make decisions regarding family and community affairs. However, men still hold important positions in the government and religious institutions.

Unearth Women for more

by JAWED NAQVI

It was a placard that as students we would draw cartoons on or write slogans with marker pens or thick brushes for college protests. To deter Donald Trump’s vile description of Iranians as an evil lot, the chador-clad Iranian woman chose a verse from the great Persian poet Firdausi for her placard. The 10th-century master poet is credited with reviving Persian literature. His fabled Shahnameh chronicled the legends of Persian kings with motifs and characters that were essentially pre-Islamic. The stories of Rustam and Sohrab, for example, popularised by Firdausi, relate to the early Zoroastrian period of Iran. Colonial upstarts would later drool at the awe-inspiring heritage he spawned. It was reflected in the British pretence at majesty as they attempted to mask an instinct for savage plunder.

After uprooting the Persian-Prakrit-Sanskrit culture nurtured by Muslim rulers in India, chiefly the Mughals, the British viceroy installed a Persian painting on the ceiling of the ballroom of the vice-regal palace, today’s Presidential Palace. The painting still hangs there, mocking Hindutva’s boorish hatred of Iran’s legacy of refinement in India. The painting of a Qajar-era ruler on a tiger hunt was created by an Italian artist as faux inspiration from the legends depicted in Firdausi’s magnum opus, compiled between 977 AD and 1010 AD.

The verse the woman wrote with a blue brush on a placard for the huge Nowruz march through Tehran to mark the Persian new year intrigued an American journalist watching the war. Ergo: there are foreign journalists invited by the reviled Iranian ‘regime’ to chronicle an unprovoked assault on their nation; the opposite seems true of the falsely adulated ‘democracies’ of the US and Israel where opacity and news blackouts have become a legitimate requirement in a self-harming and costly military expedition.

Donald Trump the tycoon doesn’t want the markets to shudder at his foolhardy plans to destroy Iran and thereby the Persian Gulf. Benjamin Netanyahu desperately needs to cover up the untold damage inflicted on precisely chosen targets straddling Israeli cities. One missile cautioned him that Iran could destroy the Dimona nuclear plant at will, with horrific consequences to the world, if its Bushehr nuclear power station was damaged. This is the terrifying prospect Trump and Netanyahu have jointly given birth to in an ultra-volatile region.

In modern Persian culture, Gordafarid is a feminist icon and a symbol of Iranian resistance and ingenuity.

The image of the Iranian woman’s placard was snapped from a news clip, and as such it was angled, blurred and incomplete. It was her explanation of the verse to the American interlocutor that helped me track it down to the Shahnameh. I checked out the verse with an encyclopaedic Persian scholar. The illustrious Sharif Husain Qasemi is Delhi’s only expert on Bedil, the 18th-century Persian poet notorious for being so difficult that he was considered a challenge even by the great Ghalib, himself notorious for his difficult Persian poetry. He found the verse and explained its context: “Agar sar be sar tan be koshtan daham/ Azaan beh ke kishvar be dushman Daham” (“If I give my body — from head to toe — to be killed/ That is better than giving the country to the enemy.”)

The verse is one of the most famous examples of heroic ethos (javanmardi) in Persian literature. It is spoken by a woman warrior, the legendary hero Gordafarid. The sentiment is echoed throughout the Shahnameh also by figures like Rustam or other heroes facing insurmountable odds.

Dawn or more

by IMRAN MULLA

Since the start of the Iran war, in India and Pakistan there has been a renewed interest in Iran’s cultural ties with South Asia

In March 1986 Sayyid Ali Khamenei, who would three years later become Iran’s supreme leader, gave a speech at a major conference in Tehran on the Indian poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal.

Iqbal lived in British India and engaged in the politics of that land. He died in 1938 and never visited Iran.

But Khamenei told his audience that Iqbal was a “luminous spark that washed out the darkness of the days of suffocation and repression from our hearts (through his impressions, poetry, counsel and teachings) and projected a bright picture of the future before our eyes”.

Describing himself as someone “who for years had been a follower of Iqbal and has lived emotionally in his company”, Khamenei insisted the poet “belongs to this nation”. 

“Iqbal, whose heart ached to see the Muslim people having lost their human and Islamic personality,” he said, should he have lived to visit Iran after the Islamic Revolution, “could have seen a nation standing on its feet, infused with the rich Islamic spirit.”

The supreme leader, killed earlier this month in the US-Israeli attack on Iran, was able to engage so deeply with Iqbal’s work because much of his oeuvre was in Persian.

This was the case even though Iqbal is remembered in South Asia almost entirely for his Urdu poetry.

Since the start of the current Iran war, in India and Pakistan there has been a renewed interest in Iran’s deep cultural ties with the subcontinent.

Enormous protests have erupted across Pakistan against the US-Israeli war, and not just by Shia Muslims who revered Khamenei as their religious leader. 

The Pakistani government was swift to criticise the killing of Khamenei, while India – a longtime ally of Iran – has failed to do so.

Perhaps in response to this, and to the Indian government’s strong ties with Israel, in the past week a flurry of articles have emerged in the Indian national media highlighting the country’s deep shared heritage with Iran.

A shared history

This shared heritage has been largely forgotten in the subcontinent. Most people can’t speak Persian and schools tend not to teach the language, a legacy of reforms during British rule that promoted English as the subcontinent’s lingua franca.

In Pakistan in the 1980s, the government of General Zia-ul-Haq embarked on a drive to replace Persian vocabulary in Urdu, a language formed from a fusion of Persian and Hindustani, with some Arabic words – hence “Allah Hafiz” as the term for goodbye becoming more common than the Persian “Khuda Hafiz”. 

More recently in India, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has sought to de-emphasise and in many cases erase the Muslim aspects of India’s heritage. 

Middle East Eye for more