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by TARIQ ALI

The gallery of grotesques assembled by Trump – only the toga was missing in his rendering of the Roman Emperor Nero – at Sharm-el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort synonymous with luxury and despotism, dutifully celebrated ‘Peace in the Middle East’. What ‘peace’? Earlier that day in Jerusalem, Nero had declared ‘victory’ while addressing his cheering barbarian auxiliaries and donors in the Knesset:

We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly. Bibi would call me so many times, ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of ‘em I never heard of, Bibi, and I made ‘em! [Laughter] But we’d get ‘em here, wouldn’t we, huh? And they are the best. They are the best. And you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well.

‘What a job! What a job you’ve done’, Nero marvelled. ‘These are just a few of the reasons why I am proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.’ And before the final trumpet sounded, there was a shout out to Miriam Adelson, seated in the visitors’ gallery: ‘Isn’t that right, Miriam?’ Nero reminisced:

Miriam and Sheldon would come into the [Oval] Office . . . I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else . . . Look at her, sitting there so innocently. She’s got $60 billion in the bank. $60 billion. [Laughter] I think she said, ‘No, more!’ And she loves Israel. . . Her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him . . . very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you?’ I’d say, ‘Sheldon, I’m the President of the United States, it doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in . . . they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about the Golan Heights.

This train of thought – and the strings attached to the Adelsons’ donations – led him to wonder whether her primary loyalty was to America or Israel. ‘I’m going to get her into trouble with this, but I actually asked her once, “So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?”. She refused to answer. That means, it might be Israel!’

The question is, of course, supposed to be antisemitic according to the IHRA definition; at home, American campuses are being threatened or punished by Nero’s administration for less. Once again, he says the quiet part loud: laying bare the sordid role played by Israel Lobby cash in the shameless support by the US political and cultural establishment for the destruction of Gaza.

NLR for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

“I saw spirits,” he told me. I had no reason at the time to doubt him. I was barely 10. Ravi* said he had worked in a submarine—a vessel I had heard of, abstractly—but he described its inner life, how pressure plates hummed, corridors tunnelled, and people lived and died inside the iron cocoon. He had eyes so arresting, skin soft as dusk, and he smiled like a child but spoke like a friend. One Sunday morning, on my way to church, he caught me near the banyan tree that marked the entry into my village.

He said: there is a space inside the submarine where we stand, staring into infinity. You see a wall, then a glass shield, and beyond it a place we call “vacuum”. That is where the spirits arrive. He described them: giant translucent tadpoles, illumination coiling through their wavy forms. Their eyes—ah, their eyes—were like mini-screens. Look closely and you would see life: events, places, voices, the whole arc of a life projected into that silverine retina. The owner of the spirit, dead now in flesh, lived again in those eyes.

He went on: I peered through the glass and I saw lives: quarrels, wars, deaths, rituals of gore, processions, suffering, torture, offices, witnesses, even regrets. But never laughter, never love. I did not know why; I just knew I never saw them. Because of the partition between us, I could not ask questions. But I am sure they saw me. Once, the spirit—its bulbous eyes with dancing blue and red dots—drifted close. It stared. I blinked. It blinked back. We did that Morse code of eyes for minutes.

“Do you know what Morse code is?” Ravi asked. “No,” I replied. “Ah, you will learn,” he said, and continued his story: I still believe it was a spirit that knew me—perhaps a friend, a tortured colleague, someone I once loved—because I somehow know its language. The spirit lingered, then drifted away. I told my friends. They heard me out, later I was sent home, Ravi summed up.

Over time, our meetings near the banyan tree multiplied. Ravi would arrive in a slim white dhoti, striped shirt, and kerchief tucked inside his collar. He told me stories: of flying waters, of a sea bottom carpeted in glowing roses, of lotuses that spoke and dwarfed whales, of currents that carried voices, and more.

Then one day, someone saw us talking and scolded him for “talking to children”. Others murmured, ”Why did his brother let this lunatic roam free?” They pushed him away. I remember how his face fell. I smiled back and longed to whisper, “I believe you”.

After that, I rarely saw him. When I did, we exchanged smiles. But to speak openly, to engage with him, was unthinkable. Those days, talking to a “schizophrenic”, a label I learnt later, invited ridicule, shudders, and scoldings. Soon I heard that he was ill-treated, then sheltered by some relatives, and eventually put on medication.

When I encountered him years later, he was a shell. No spirit stories, no childlike mirth. Thin, shivering, exhausted. Eyes empty. The stories had left him. His face had shrunk. I didn’t see him after that. But I remembered his stories.

Frontline for more

by IAN ANGUS

Some 2.8 million years ago, the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere dropped, triggering an Ice Age. Since then, long-term changes in Earth’s orbit and tilt, called Milankovitch cycles, have produced global temperature swings every 100,000 years or so. In the glacial (cold) phases, kilometers-thick ice sheets covered most of the planet; in shorter interglacial (warm) periods, the ice retreated toward the poles. For the past 11,700 years, we have lived in an interglacial period that geologists call the Holocene Epoch.

Under normal circumstances, the glaciers and polar ice caps would now be slowly growing. As recent research shows, “if not for the effects of increasing CO2, glacial inception would reach a maximum rate within the next 11,000 years.”1 Instead of global heating, the Earth’s future would be global freezing, but only in the distant future.

However, as anyone even slightly aware of environmental issues knows, the world’s glaciers and ice caps are not expanding; they are shrinking — fast. Between 1994 and 2017, Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice, and the rate of decline has increased by 57 percent since the 1990s.2 Even if greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced, conditions preventing the return of continental ice sheets will likely persist for at least 50,000 years. If emissions do not stop, the ice will not be back for at least half a million years.3

In short, as a direct result of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity, the Ice Age has been canceled.

This is concrete proof of one of the most radical conclusions of twenty-first century science: “The earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita.”4

The scientists who first reached that conclusion named the new epoch the Anthropocene. An overwhelming volume of evidence shows that a new stage in Earth system history has begun, one characterized by major changes to many aspects of the natural world, heading toward conditions that humans may not survive. They have shown that many of the largest changes are irreversible on any human timescale. They have dated the beginning of this radical transformation to the mid-twentieth century. They have also shown that physical records of the change can be seen in geological strata.

To any reasonable observer, the case is irrefutable. Yet, some prominent scientists deny that a qualitative change has taken place, and one of the world’s largest scientific organizations has voted against formal recognition of the new epoch. The research and debates that led to this perverse result help to illuminate the challenges facing scientists and ecosocialists in our time.

Earth System Science

During the 1970s and ’80s, increasing numbers of scientists came to the conclusion that traditional scientific methods focusing on local or regional issues were insufficient for understanding environmental problems — that Earth as a whole had entered a period of extreme crisis caused by human activity.

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by ANITA NAIDU

The most insidious privatization of the 21st century isn’t material—it’s moral.

The right to define “goodness”, once born of collective struggle, has been seized by elites who trade in humanitarian spectacle.

Melinda Gates, María Corina Machado and Meghan Markle operate on different stages—philanthropy, politics, celebrity—but share the same function: to brand conscience.

Each turns compassion into capital and empathy into a marketing language that protects power rather than threatens it.

Gates and the Philanthropy of Containment 

Melinda Gates is the soft face of imperial power — a philanthropist who launders extraction through care.

Her coronation as a moral voice at the Desmond Tutu Peace Lecture exposed how philanthropy now performs containment rather than change.

The stage itself was symbolic: built to honor a man who made confrontation a moral duty, now offered to a woman who turned that duty into decor.

She stood inside a legacy built on risking everything to confront apartheid and used it to promote a brand of feminism that risks nothing.

Gaza burned; she said nothing. Her silence was not hesitation — it was calculation.

She replaced Tutu’s politics of confrontation with a politics of comfort as her feminism is engineered for elite compatibility: all uplift, no opposition.

What she brings is narrative management not generosity. Philanthropy has become the language through which empire edits its image.

Because empire’s favorite laundry detergent is feminism. The cleaner is uses to wash blood into virtue.

Investigative journalist Tim Schwab later traced what followed: two months after Gates’s lecture, theDesmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundationreceived a$30 000grantfrom theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In his October 2025 report, Schwab placed this within a wider pattern — philanthropic institutions accepting money from the same billionaires they then elevate with humanitarian honors.The optics, he noted, suggested a closed circuit where wealth purchases moral credibility.

The pattern held elsewhere. Weeks later, Gates accepted a human-rights award from the Clooney Foundation for Justice— an organization that, as

Schwab reported, has received millions in donations overseen by her through both the Gates Foundation and Pivotal Ventures.

His investigation placed this within a broader pattern: elites funding the very institutions that later celebrate them, a feedback loop of moral self-accreditation.

Her wealth buys access to movements built on sacrifice and then drains them of meaning.

She steps into spaces forged by resistance and repurposes them as backdrops for benevolence.

It is not confrontation she offers, but comfort —  empire’s preferred aesthetic.

Machado and the Capture of Peace

María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize was never about peace—it was about rewarding obedience to U.S. interests.

It was not recognition; it was choreography—the ritual of allegiance disguised as moral virtue.When she dedicated her award to Donald Trump, the transformation was complete. A symbol once meant to honor resistance became an instrument of domination. Trump—whose foreign policy left a trail of sanctions, bombings, and proxy wars—was recast as peacemaker.

Counterpunch for more

by AYESHA RAZZAQUE

Soon after the invention of the telescope in 1608, astronomers in Europe began observing the sun and noticed dark spots on its surface in varying numbers, and started tracking the daily and monthly number of these sunspots. In 1749, the record-keeping of sunspots was institutionalised. Earlier, non-continuous records from various sources were collected, compiled and prepended, giving us what is known today as the International Sunspot Number dataset. This dataset has proved essential to understanding solar physics, the relationship between the solar cycle and Earth’s climate, space weather, solar flares, and the risks to modern technology like communication systems, GPS, power grids, etc. And it all began, not for a practical use, not out of profit motives, but simply because it could be done as an exercise in data collection, driven by scientific curiosity, to know the world we inhabit.

For the last few weeks, news outlets have reported on the floods and the damage they have caused. I have been struck by the seeming lack of official data about flooding and resulting agricultural losses. Instead, the vacuum left the door open to just about anyone to inject their own estimates. While the waters were still rising and making their way downstream, questionable estimates of agricultural losses were being thrown around, gaining traction.

One that was widely cited was an estimate by the Pakistan Business Forum. Those estimates were picked up and repeated by successive news reports, including some ministers. In the absence of alternatives, they even made their way into reports by foreign news outlets. While I am sure the PBF is capable of and resourced to do a great many things, I am certain that generating running estimates of countywide agricultural losses is not among them. Its estimates are not accompanied by any meaningful description of the used methodology and are likely projections derived from incomplete reports of the Provincial Disaster Management Authority and other governmental bodies.

Even without floods, accurate figures about crop production are a constant challenge. Estimates, which inform decisions about the export of agricultural products, vary widely and have led to bad calls. There is no reliable, continuous data collection mechanism in place.

Dawn for more

by B. R. GOWANI

in 1991, Papa Bush (George H. W. Bush) went to war against Iraq

Dick Cheney was part of that devastating war

Iraq witnessed death and destruction on a great scale

US didn’t suffer any demolition because Iraq had no ICBMs

nor did Bush face any trial as a war criminal

who was gonna try?

it was one of the biggest rogue action the world had ever seen

in 2000, the US Supreme Court helped George W. Bush become president

that is, Baby Bush became President, by cheating

Cheney accepted to be Bush’s Vice President

just before that he was the CEO of Halliburton

in 2003, Baby Bush (George W. Bush) initiated a war against Iraq

the “war criminal trinity:” George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney

Cheney is considered the architect of the second US war against Iraq

in August 2002, Cheney declared to Veterans of Foreign Wars

“Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

General Anthony Zinni was on the same stage too

(Zinni was United Sates Special Envoy for Middle East Peace)

years later, Zinni responded to Cheney’s lie in a documentary:

“It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”

why did Zinni talk years later of Cheney’s lie and not on that stage?

this is the problem with people in power — never on time to save lives

war proved immensely beneficial to Halliburton and thus Cheney

what was the reason for creating chaos in Iraq and destroying it?

Bush government claimed Iraq had WMD or weapons of mass destruction

in the United Nations, Colin Powell showed a vial as a proof

it was a total lie and Powell came out as a fool but the lie worked

a former US diplomat Joe Wilson said Iraq didn’t purchase uranium

Cheney went on a smear campaign and exposed Valerie Plame identity

Plame, Joe Wilson’s wife, was a overt CIA agent

the war lasted almost nine years and gave birth to ISIS

Iraq and its allies with US fought ISIS or the Islamic State for 4 years

Cheney was unrepentant for killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis

“What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the right — same course of action.”

over 4 years back, one of the war criminal Rumsfeld died

on Nov. 3, 2025, Dick Cheney, another of the war criminal trinity, died

one would want to feel happy and celebrate disgusting Dick’s death

because this Dick was one monstrous dick

but one just cannot

because one after another has continued ruling US

besides, the world has also so many dicks in power …

That is just as it is, according to the prevalent world situation:

Everything ends badly. It’s the law of the universe.

Rohinton Mistry, “A fine balance”

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

by RANDA GHAZY

Italy’s pro-Palestinian wave—from dock strikes to viral outrage—shows conscience is alive. But where was this action over the past 2 years? writes Randa Ghazy.

“Define children.” These chilling words, said by the president of the Friends of Israel Federation, Eyal Mizrahi, during an exchange that was broadcast on Italy’s È sempre Cartabianca, recently went viral.

This followed comedian Enzo Iacchetti asking, “were the 50,000 Palestinians killed Hamas terrorists? And the children? Did they have Kalashnikovs?” after Mizrahi claimed that 20,000 to 22,000 of Palestinians killed during the genocide, were Hamas fighters.

“Define children” became a rallying cry across social media platforms in Italy, with posts often paired with images of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. It revealed the extent to which Palestinians have been dehumanised to justify their oppression.

Until recently, few would have expected Iacchetti—best known for hosting a satirical show—to become a symbol of pro-Palestinian activism. But with many political leaders in Italy failing to reflect public outrage or uphold constitutional values, artists and comedians have stepped up.

Mass action

Alongside this moment, several catalysts ignited the wave of activism in solidarity with Palestine that has taken place across Italy. At the end of September, dockworkers in the Italian port of Genoa called to block shipments of goods to Israel in case of an attack against the global Sumud Flotilla.

The mission, carrying over 40 Italians, faced derision from the Italian government and was abandoned by Italian and Spanish naval escorts as it neared the ‘risk zone’. This is where the Israeli navy had previously intercepted humanitarian missions, even killing 10 Turkish activists on a similar mission in 2010.

As expected, the Sumud flotilla was intercepted, hundreds were detained, and Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, mocked the activists publicly, labelling them “terrorists.”

In response, thousands spontaneously protested in cities across Italy—Milan, Rome, Turin, Naples, alongside cities around the world. And, on 3 October, Italy witnessed one of its largest pro-Palestinian mobilisations in decades, with over 2 million people participating in general strikes.

Meanwhile, some Italian media began shifting their tone, questioning previously unchallenged Israeli narratives.

Despite official condemnations of the drone strike on the flotilla in Tunis in September, which we now know was approved by Netanyahu, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni called the mission “irresponsible” and dismissed the nationwide strike as an excuse for a long weekend.

Yet the deeper truth is that Meloni’s government—like many across Europe—has actively supported Israel: abstaining in votes against ceasefire resolutions at the UN General Assembly and voting against the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, continuing arms sales, and even protecting Israeli soldiers vacationing in Italy.

Now, Meloni has been reported to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of complicity in genocide committed in the Gaza Strip, alongside Italy’s defence and foreign ministers.

The plight of prisoners

The flotilla may not have broken the blockade, but those who have been involved and movements that have supported them still see it as a success.

Indeed, it helped expose the brutal reality of the occupation, awakened civic conscience, and shifted activism from social media into the streets.

New Arab for more

by ANITA NAIDU

The headlines call it a ceasefire. The diplomats call it peace. But what’s being unveiled isn’t peace — it’s colonial revival.

Under the banner of reconstruction, Gaza’s future is being handed to a “Board of Peace” chaired by the very architects of perpetual war. A colonial council of overseers in new suits, governing through Palestinians kept under supervision. The vocabulary has changed; the hierarchy hasn’t.

Reconstruction as Recolonization

Empire’s genius has always been its ability to evolve its branding faster than its critics can decode it. Once, it conquered through armies. Now, it conquers through management. “Stabilization forces” replace occupation troops, and “special economic zones” stand in for open-air prisons.

The plan is textbook economic occupation dressed up as aid: rebuild what bombs destroyed, but rebuild it for control, not sovereignty. Rebuild it to be invested in, not lived in. Every brick becomes a bond. Every promise of peace becomes collateral for another round of extraction.

The Architecture of Obedience

When empire shifts from invasion to administration, it doesn’t loosen its grip — it professionalizes it. The machinery of global governance — from the UN to development banks — has perfected the art of outsourcing domination. Local faces, foreign terms. Indigenous hands, imperial blueprints.

The illusion is participation. Palestinians are “included” in decisions already made elsewhere, and their autonomy is measured by how well they comply with frameworks written by their occupiers.
It’s the same choreography every time: defer freedom indefinitely, call that restraint, and sell the delay as diplomacy.

Markets Over Justice

The applause isn’t for liberation — it’s for stability. For markets that can breathe again. For investors who can build again. The “peace process” is a portfolio strategy. War devastates; reconstruction monetizes; the cycle continues.

Empire kills, pauses, then rebrands the pause as moral progress. Each new “peace” agreement is just a maintenance plan for domination, administered by those fluent in the language of compassion.

Naming the Lie

What’s being celebrated today isn’t an end to occupation — it’s the outsourcing of it. Management replacing freedom. Oversight masquerading as care. Empire discovering that optics outperform armies.

And that is the real frontier: domination with softer branding.

Because peace without sovereignty is just management with better PR.

Counterpunch for more

by CAITLIN A. JOHNSTONE

In an interview with Swedish paper Aftonbladet, Greta Thunberg has corroborated earlier eyewitness reports that she and her fellow Global Sumud Flotilla activists were subjected to monstrous abuses by Israeli officials after being abducted from their boats carrying aid for Palestinians in Gaza.

Here are some excerpts (quotes from Thunberg are italicized, quotes from Aftonbladet are in bold):

“They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.”

“They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.”

“They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.”

In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag. “The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.”

“They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.”

Greta was then taken into a building to be searched and undressed. “The guards have no empathy or humanity, and they keep taking selfies with me. There’s a lot I don’t remember. So much is happening at once. You’re in shock. You’re in pain, but you go into a state of trying to stay calm.”

Outside, she was forced to take off her clothes again, she says. “It was mockery, rough handling, and everything was filmed. Everything they do is extremely violent.”

“It was so hot, like 40 degrees. We begged the whole time: Can we have water? Can we have water? In the end, we screamed. The guards walked in front of the bars the whole time, laughing and holding up their water bottles. They threw the bottles with water in them into the trash cans in front of us.”

“When people fainted, we banged on the cages and asked for a doctor. Then the guards came and said, ‘We’re going to gas you.’ It was standard for them to say that.”

“This shows that if Israel, with the whole world watching, can treat a well-known, white person with a Swedish passport this way, just imagine what they do to Palestinians behind closed doors.”

Thunberg told Aftonbladet that the Swedish government greatly downplayed the abuse she and her fellow Sumud Flotilla activists suffered, and wouldn’t even bring them water:

“We were together and told them about the treatment we received. About the lack of food, water, about the abuse. The torture. We showed them the physical injuries we had?—?bruises and scratches. We gave them all our contact details?—?I gave them my father’s number and the number of our contact in the organization. We were clear: everything we say now must be released to the media.”

“They didn’t do anything, they just said: ’Our job is to listen to you. We are here and you are entitled to consular support.’”

“We said over and over again: we need water. And they saw that the guards had water bottles. The embassy staff said: ’We’ll make a note of that.’ One of us, Vincent, said: ’Next time we meet you, you must bring water.’”

Then it took two days before the embassy staff showed up again.

“They didn’t bring any water, except for a small bottle of their own that was half empty. Vincent, who was in the worst shape, got to drink it. We kept asking the guards, ‘Can we have some water?’ but they just walked around with their water bottles and didn’t answer.”

Monthle Review Online for more