by TAJ HASHMI

Analyzing the contrasting leadership styles of Mujib and Yunus, particularly their ascension to power following the Bangladeshi revolutions of 1971 and 2024, will provide a deeper insight into the underlying issues at play. Although apples and oranges are unlikely to be compared, keeping in mind their differences, both fruits can be compared. The differences between 1971 and 2024 are significant in many aspects, including in Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Muhammad Yunus represent two distinct figures from different eras. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a politician who became a national leader, while Muhammad Yunus is known as an NGO leader who later took on a governmental role and gained worldwide recognition as a Nobel Laureate and original thinker. Bangladesh has transformed from one of the poorest countries in the world to one that is likely to become a middle-income nation in the near future. With Yunus as the leader of the statecraft in the country, we can consider what the country went through before and after 1971 until the revolutionary changes of 2024 and beyond.

During the prolonged political crises in 1971 and 2024, Mujib and Yunus emerged as national leaders in Bangladesh. Mujib played a pivotal role in the political turmoil that ultimately led to the formation of Bangladesh following the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. In contrast, Yunus stepped into the political spotlight during a different crisis, which culminated in the overthrow of the one-party Hasina dictatorship on August 5, 2024. While there was no evidence that Yunus played a role in Hasina’s overthrow, militant student protesters forced Sheikh Hasina, who was widely regarded as the most corrupt and brutal dictator since 1971, to welcome Yunus into the political arena as the Chief Advisor of the country, equivalent to the head of government. Mujib’s rise to political power was intentional, whereas Yunus assumed his role by default. The political vacuum that followed Hasina’s overthrow allowed Yunus to briefly lead an interim caretaker government tasked with organizing fresh elections and facilitating a transition to democracy. Mujib was a politician who championed complete autonomy (if not freedom) for East Bengal/East Pakistan in 1948 and again in 1971. In contrast, Yunus was celebrated as a Nobel Laureate and a pioneer of microcredit, a system credited with alleviating poverty in Bangladesh and beyond. While Mujib focused on political leadership, Yunus was previously an academic and NGO operator before becoming Bangladesh’s Chief Advisor in August 2024.

It’s crucial to provide a brief background on Bangladesh. We should explore the country’s prehistory, from the beginning of British colonial rule to the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. Understanding the dynamics of nationalism, religion, and the people’s political culture will allow for an objective comparison of Mujib and Yunus, along with their philosophies and the contexts in which they lived.

SAJ for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear Reader,

Béla Tarr died yesterday.

The Hungarian filmmaker, who made slowness an art form and silence a character, passed away on January 6, 2026, after a prolonged illness. He was 70. The European Film Academy announced his death, describing him as “an outstanding director and a personality with a strong political voice”. Those who have seen his work would add: a man who understood despair the way a doctor understands disease—intimately, diagnostically, without flinching.

Tarr was born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1955 and began making films at 16. His early work documented the poverty and spiritual exhaustion of post-communist Eastern Europe with an unflinching eye that earned him both admirers and enemies. The Hungarian authorities shuttered his Társulás Filmstúdió in 1985 for political reasons; Tarr never softened his anarchist convictions. His 1988 film Damnation premiered at Berlin and established his signature: controlled camera movements that seemed to breathe, compositions that made you conscious of time as a physical object, a weight.

And then came Sátántangó. The Satan’s Tango.

Seven and a half hours of monochrome devastation, adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s novel, depicting a dying Hungarian village whose inhabitants follow a charismatic figure returned, supposedly, from the dead. Those who sat through it came out with what film critic Peter Bradshaw called “a kind of filmic PTSD”—transformed, somehow, by the experience of watching people trudge through mud, drink themselves into oblivion, and surrender their agency to a con man promising salvation (sounds familiar?).

I watched Sátántangó a decade ago. The experience defies description. Tarr’s long takes—some lasting 10, 12, 15 minutes without a cut—forced a tectonic shift in how attention functioned in me. You stopped waiting for something to happen and began noticing what was already there: the texture of rain on stone, the particular quality of light in a bar where hope had gone to die, the way a human face in extended close-up reveals not personality but something closer to geology. The silences were structural, load-bearing. In them, you heard the film thinking.

Frontline for more

by AASIM SAJJAD AKHTAR

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” — Antonio Gramsci

The more things change, the more they stay the same. China may have emerged as a power of global import, but America is still the world’s sheriff, and the Trump ad­­ministration wants everyone to know that.

The dust had barely settled on the audacious kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro that the Yankee propaganda machinery started fanning the flames of war on Iran. Imperialism abroad has been accompanied by Trump’s unleashing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons on American streets with orders to literally shoot ‘suspects’ at sight.

The combination of bravado and terror portends more darkness ahead. But what is the end game?

There isn’t one. At a base level, Washington still just wants the oil, the lifeblood of the global capitalist order over which it has presided since the end of World War II. This order is creaking at the seams, but a better world system is not visible yet. Venezuela sits atop the biggest reserves of black gold in the world. Iran is number three on the list. US imperialism wants it all.

Then there is the other bedrock of the military-industrial complex — making war. In the face of China’s inexorable economic rise and partial erosion of dollar hegemony, US power is not what it was. But Washington possesses 10 times the means of destruction of any other single country. It still bombs and invades other countries at will, kidnaps heads of state in broad daylight.

The combination of bravado and terror portends more darkness.

Will military might and oil stave off America’s terminal economic decline? The answer depends on who monopolises the new global commodity on the block — critical minerals. Or maybe you prefer the term ‘rare earth’. Whatever your fancy, control over the rock equates to monopolies of renewable energy, electric vehicles, everyday smart technology, high-grade weapons systems and so much more.

Dawn for more

by HAMZA RAO

A Washington-based outfit is quietly spreading Modi’s Hindutva by weaponising lawsuits, lobbying, liberal discourse

As the political air around India is thick with the threat of increased minority persecution at home and murmurs that Delhi is turning rogue abroad, an unexpected frontline of Hindutva is taking shape thousands of miles away: the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a US-based organisation that has mastered the art of cloaking a majoritarian project in the language of American liberalism.

The HAF has emerged as one of Hindutva’s most diligent custodians on foreign soil, quietly and at times leaping at its critics’ throats to fortify its ideological frontiers and assert an Islamophobic narrative, often in alliance with the American far-right.

Its leadership and founding personnel trace roots to older Hindu-right organisations, some of which are linked to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), such as the Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu Education Foundation (HEF).

More recently, the organisation openly rebuked Western media outlets, including the New York Times, for “whitewashing” the Pahalgam attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir, calling them out for ignoring the “religious element” of the attack.

Suhag Shukla, executive director of the organisation, even suggested a better framing of the attack: “Hindus massacred in Kashmir by Islamists in a terror attack by Pakistan-backed group”.

A 68-page investigation produced by Rutgers Law School in New Jersey earlier this year offers a stark assessment of how the organisation does this.

The report, “Hindutva in America: A Threat to Equality and Religious Pluralism”, traces how these groups have strategically ridden the currents of post-9/11 Islamophobia, leveraging the political and cultural climate generated by the so-called “war on terror” to normalise and advance an ethnonationalist project within American public life.

“By couching their rhetoric within the mainstream narrative that Muslims worldwide are presumptively terrorists and violent, Hindutva organisations join the chorus of other anti-Muslim right-wing groups.”

The study further identifies two core objectives guiding Hindutva’s diaspora strategy in the US: the systematic construction of Muslims as perpetual outsiders and security threats, and a sustained effort to curtail academic freedom by intimidating scholars, policing curricula, and narrowing the space for critical inquiry.

On one side, HAF keeps a polished, liberal-friendly exterior, borrowing the vocabulary of pluralism and progressive inclusion while scrumptiously smuggling in Hindutva’s conceptual DNA. On the other hand, it lashes out at scholars, journalists and activists who try to expose the toxin hidden beneath its rhetoric.

Tribune for more

THE STAR

While the usual East Asian spots remain popular, Uzbekistan has emerged as a compelling alternative for those wanting a mix of alpine adventure and deep Islamic history.

Amirsoy: A New Winter Standard

The highlight for any winter traveller is the Amirsoy Mountain Resort, the largest ski destination in Uzbekistan. Nestled on the spurs of the Chatkal Ridge within the western Tian Shan Mountains (a Unesco World Heritage site), it is located just an hour’s drive from Tashkent. It is easy to see why the resort is a draw as the majestic, sprawling peaks create a stunning backdrop, offering a sharp, beautiful contrast between the crisp, sunny air and the endless blankets of white snow.

Amirsoy features high-speed gondolas that take visitors up to 2,290m to ski down the slopes. Even if you aren’t a skier, the “top of the world” views from the peak are worth the trip.

The Star for more

by PHIL ROCKSTROH

From the Zionist lobby’s media buyouts, to Christian-nationalism’s grudge match with Christian-Zionism, to Mamdani-envoked moral panic to “the Mar-a-Lago face.”

The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:

The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.

Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.

In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I gaze upon my aging face, it seems as if its time-touched features are being drawn by the very hand of a redemptive force.

*****

More mingling amid confederacies of ghouls and galleries of grotesques:

Pro-Zionist billionaires are among the High Dollar donors — thus are among the ownership class — that dictate the agendas of the US political class. Said billionaires have, as of late gone, on a buying spree of corporate media properties. Their gambit being, to enforce narratives that are a litany of pro-Israel lies e.g., foremost among them prevarication e.g., the denial of genocide perpetrated on the people of Gaza.

With vast resources at their disposal their employ media operatives to intimidate and cancel critics, even for the most mild criticism of Israel. As a consequence, there has been a noxious return of antisemitic tropes regarding Jews as a whole e.g., as hidden, scheming controllers of the world.

Are the vast majority of anti-Zionists antisemites? No. Are Nick Fuentes’ and his knuckle-dragging Groypers antisemitists? You can bet your jackboots they are.

The greatest threat to power-devoid Jews such as myself in the coming years: the conflation of Zionism and Judaism by Israeli propagandists.

Regarding Israel: A schism among the religious right:

At present, we are witnessing a power struggle among death cultist Christian rightists between Christian-nationalists nativism-gripped xenophobes and Christian-Zionist End Timer zealots. The former’s ranks are comprised of young, online, Groyper types who are possessed by a Brown Shirt mindset while the latter are (far) older Jesus fetishist fantasists — who believe every Israeli transgression against humanity, from ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, to perpetual war on its neighbors, to prison guard rape gangs bring the sin-reeking earth closer to their humanity-loathing fantasy of End Times wrought salvation.

Dissident Voice for more

B. R. GOWANI

League of Nations

• LoN or League of Nations was founded on January 10, 1920.
• The formal agreement for LoN was signed on June 28, 1919.
• The central force behind LoN was US president Woodrow Wilson.
• Same year Wilson was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for LoN.
• Ironically, the US didn’t join LoN because of Republican Senators’ opposition.
• LoN was the first international organization for solving inter-governmental problems.
• The most members LoN had was 58.
• The number would have been much higher but many countries were under colonial rule.
• LoN headquarter in Geneva remained closed during WWII (1939-!945).
• On April 8, 1946, the League of Nations came to an end.

United Nations

• UN or United Nations founding was decided on June 12, 1941.
• By August, the Atlantic Charter was drafted by US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill about the goals once the Second World War ends.
• The Atlantic Charter was signed on June 26, 1945 with the goal of maintaining international peace and security.
• The UN became an US instrument to wage wars, vetoing resolutions against Palestinian independence, supporting Israeli wars and its stealing of Palestinian lands and its committing of genocide.
• Despite brave work by the UN Special Rapporteur like Francesca Albanese, and others like her, the UN has not been allowed to perform the work it was designed for because it was born with deformities, like the veto power given to the five permanent members: The US, The UK, France, Russia, and Taiwan (China, since 1971), which could kill any initiative by the UN Security Council (5 permanent members plus 10 non-permanent members elected every two years). The UN General Assembly consists of around 200 member nations.
• Will the UN survive? It is hard to say because another organization TN or TSO has already been established. Trump said the following:
• “The U.N. just hasn’t been very helpful. I’m a big fan of the U.N.’s potential, but it has never lived up to its potential. The U.N. should have settled every one of the wars that I settled. I never went to them. I never even thought to go to them.”

Board of Peace or TN or TSO

• Board of Peace (BoP) was announced on September 29, 2025, and came into existence on January 22, 2026 with a speech by US President Donald Trump who is chairman .
• The initial mission of BoP was related to reconstruction of Gaza Strip, Palestine, which has been totally destroyed by Israel who indulged in a genocide of Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, Gaza is not mentioned in the charter. (See the full text here.)
• It is Trump’s prerogative to accept or reject new members, or accept and reject as he did with Canada. Canada was accepted as a member but then Trump didn’t like the speech of Canadian Premier Mark Carney <1> which he delivered at WEF (World Economic Forum) which was critical of Trump’s tariffs and his demand to get Greenland.
• It will be a three year membership unless it is renewed by Trump. Those who pay US$1,000,000,000 ($1 billion) fee in cash within the first year of the Charter’s entry into force will have a permanent seat — the world pretty much knows how permanent the agreements with the US are.
• Out of the 62 countries Trump invited to join TN, only 26 have accepted the offer, and that also to save their asses from the wrath of Trump. (Many of them are Muslim countries.)
• Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t attend the ceremony because of an arrest warrant issued against him by the ICC (International Criminal Court) for a genocide of Palestinians. The Swiss government had declared its intention to arrest Netanyahu if he entered Switzerland.
• It is not Board of Peace (BoP) but is Trump Nations (TN) or Trump Sycophants Organization (TSO).
• Not even a week had passed since the charter was ratified, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three warships have arrived in the Middle East because the Chairman of the Board of Peace who wants to establish peace wants to bomb Iran!

Will BoP survive?

BoP is a Trump man show; so many nations, including the four permanent UN members, Britain, China, France, and Russia, won’t join it. Pakistani Dawn newspaper’s former editor Abbas Nasir expresses some hope:

“But if it stops the genocide, and leads to some relief for the Gaza population and sets things on the path to reconstruction and rehabilitation it will be worthwhile. This is how powerless we are to see justice prevail in the world.”

BoP will further weaken the UN and perhaps make it irrelevant and let it die. Only time will tell. However, the BoP’s life will not be too long either.

Note:

<1> Carney’s speech was laden with hypocrisy. Just one point:

“… the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

Why just the middle powers, why not also include the small powers too. Venezuela, Iran, Palestine, Iraq, Haiti, and so many others were on the White menu and were being eaten, did Canada protested or tried to prevent those being eaten? No. Canada was also an accomplice.

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

by KSHAMA SAWANT

Trump’s ramping up of deportations is horrendous and dangerous. But it is part of a long-term agenda shared by Republicans and Democrats

Donald Trump’s ICE is terrorising American cities. Thousands are being snatched off the streets, and drivers are being pulled over by masked and warrantless ICE agents in unmarked cars. Peaceful activist and mother Renee Good was brutally murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis. The public approval rating for ICE has plummeted since Trump took office, and a majority of Americans now disapprove of ICE. Trump’s own popularity has cratered to an unprecedented low. Yet, the Democratic Party has refused to fight Trump and the Republican Party. This is because creating and funding ICE and super-exploiting immigrant workers for Wall Street’s greed have always been a bipartisan agenda.

The Democrats control the governor’s office and majorities in both houses of the legislature in 16 states. They control the mayor’s office in 67 of the 100 largest cities, many of which have experienced some of the most shocking attacks by ICE. These Democrats could declare today that their cities will stop all collaboration with ICE, and follow through. Data reveals that ICE arrests are substantially greater in states where police and other departments cooperate with and share data with ICE. Democratic mayors and city councils could pass emergency legislation banning local agencies from sharing data with ICE and enforce the law with serious penalties, including firing, for agency heads. Local Democrats could pass emergency legislation banning ICE and all other law enforcement officers from wearing masks. They can use their public platforms, which can reach millions of working people, to launch mass protests and civil disobedience.

The Democratic Party has failed to carry out a single one of these actions. In Minneapolis, the Democrats, led by Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have allowed ICE to launch its dreaded Operation Metro Surge, which has unleashed 3,000 agents in the city. The Democratic Party controls Washington state, where I reside. Chillingly, the state’s agencies allowed federal agencies such as ICE and Homeland Security to query the state’s Department of Licensing database nearly 2.7 million times in 2025 alone.

Trump’s ramping up of deportations is horrendous and dangerous. But it is part of a long-term agenda shared by Republicans and Democrats. The 4.4 million deportations plus border expulsions under Joe Biden exceeded those during any single presidential term since Republican George W Bush’s second term. During the eight years of Barack Obama, over 3 million people were deported, more than all 20th-century presidents combined, earning him the title “Deporter-in-Chief”. The Democratic Party is not a “lesser evil”. Both parties are responsible for brutal attacks on immigrants and working people, atrocities around the world, imperialist wars, and the plundering of resources worldwide, which itself drives immigration.

Attacks on immigrants are endemic to this system, not only in the US, but globally. The capitalist class impoverishes indigenous communities and creates refugees and immigrants. Once the immigrants arrive in the economically advanced nation, it is in the capitalists’ interests to oppress them to keep the working class divided. By keeping immigrant workers marginalised, paid lower-tier wages, and always fearful of deportation, the bosses can set the (low) bar for wages and working conditions. They pit native-born workers against immigrant workers in a continual race to the bottom. This is why we need international working-class solidarity against this anti-immigrant agenda.

The Indian Express for more

by DARREN RHODES

Continuous sleep is a modern habit, not an evolutionary constant, which helps explain why many of us still wake at 3am and wonder if something’s wrong. It might help to know that this is a deeply human experience.

For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond describe how, after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn.

Breaking the night into two parts probably changed how time felt. The quiet interval gave nights a clear middle, which can make long winter evenings feel less continuous and easier to manage.

The midnight interval was not dead time; it was noticed time, which shapes how long nights are experienced. Some people would get up to tend to chores like stirring the fire or checking on animals. Others stayed in bed to pray or contemplate dreams they’d just had. Letters and diaries from pre-industrial times mention people using the quiet hours to read, write or even socialise quietly with family or neighbours. Many couples took advantage of this midnight wakefulness for intimacy.

Literature from as far back as ancient Greek poet Homer and Roman poet Virgil contains references to an “hour which terminates the first sleep,” indicating how commonplace the two-shift night was.

How we lost the ‘second sleep’

The disappearance of the second sleep happened over the past two centuries due to profound societal changes. Artificial lighting is one of them. In the 1700s and 1800s, first oil lamps, then gas lighting, and eventually electric light, began turning night into more usable waking time. Instead of going to bed shortly after sunset, people started staying up later into the evening under lamplight.

The Conversation for more