by JACK MENG-TAT CHIA

China and India locked in a not-so-holy geopolitical competition for Buddhism’s diplomatic high ground

In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, punctuated by trade wars, rising costs, and fractured alliances, diplomacy is increasingly being conducted not just in boardrooms and embassies but in temples and pilgrimage sites.

From May to June this year, India loaned sacred relics of the Buddha to Vietnam for a historic multi-city exposition. Drawing nearly 15 million devotees, the event underscored not only the enduring appeal of Buddhist piety but also religion’s growing role in diplomacy.

A year earlier, India had loaned similar relics to Thailand to mark Makha Bucha Day and King Vajiralongkorn’s birthday, reflecting a growing pattern of religious soft power.

China has also embraced Buddhist diplomacy to advance its foreign policy objectives and shape cultural narratives. In December last year, it sent the Buddha’s tooth relic from Beijing’s Lingguang Temple on a high-profile loan to Thailand, an event that was widely promoted and attended by Thai elites.

Beijing has also asserted its authority over Tibetan Buddhism by claiming the right to determine the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation. While religious in form, these actions reflect a deeper geopolitical strategy: the use of Buddhism in foreign policy.

Buddhist diplomacy is not a new phenomenon. Monarchs across Asia historically used Buddhist relics, texts and emissaries to assert legitimacy and affirm alliances. Today, this practice is experiencing a revival across the Asia-Pacific, which is home to nearly half a billion Buddhists.

Governments are rediscovering Buddhism as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, narrative-building and strategic influence. While this opens new avenues for connection and cooperation, it also carries risks, especially when spiritual traditions are co-opted for political purposes or become entangled in geopolitical rivalries.

India, China and the contest for influence

India and China are the most prominent actors in this resurgence, both drawing on their Buddhist heritage to shape regional and global perceptions, often in subtle rivalry.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has positioned itself as the Buddha’s homeland and invested in initiatives such as the “Buddhist Circuit” and relic loans to strengthen ties with Buddhist-majority nations.

Asia Times for more

by MAWADDA ISKANDAR

Abu Dhabi’s global mercenary network deploys foreign fighters to crush dissent, pursue expansionist ambitions, and support Israel’s regional geopolitical agenda.

Fleeing its notorious record and mounting international legal scrutiny, Blackwater, the world’s most infamous private military company, found safe harbor in the Persian Gulf. There, the UAE opened its coffers, welcoming the mercenary firm with open arms. A new empire was forged on a brutal foundation: safeguarding monarchies and executing foreign agendas in exchange for cash, immunity, and impunity.

In 2009, Blackwater rebranded as Xe Services LLC after a string of war crimes in Iraq, notably the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad two years earlier. The cosmetic change masked a continuity of purpose, which is circumventing international law and orchestrating illicit operations from the shadows.

Founder Erik Prince officially stepped down but relocated to the UAE in 2010, where he launched Reflex Responses (also known as R2) and retained a 51 percent stake, ushering in a new era of industrial-scale mercenary recruitment.

City of Mercenaries

By 2011, the outlines of a covert UAE mercenary army had emerged, tasked with exerting influence across West Asia and Africa. This was no accident as Blackwater played a central role, with then-Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) serving as one of its chief patrons.

A host of enabling conditions made the project viable. Abu Dhabi had become a haven for fugitives and illicit finance. South America’s Colombia became the recruitment bedrock through an agreement to build a mercenary force led by former FBI agent Ricky Chambers, a close Prince ally. These mercenaries received the “Rincón” designation, granting them immunity from prosecution under the UAE’s military intelligence apparatus.

In May 2011, the New York Times (NYT) exposed details of 800 men who entered the Persian Gulf state disguised as construction workers but were swiftly transferred to Zayed Military City via a Prince-run company, forming part of a $500-million deal. By July 2017, LobeLog reported hundreds of foreign fighters had been deployed to Yemen, including 450 Latin Americans from nations like Panama, El Salvador, and Chile.

By 2022, the Washington Post revealed that over 500 retired US military personnel had been hired as contractors by Persian Gulf states, including the UAE, for salaries up to $300,000 per year. Colombian fighters continued to arrive via GSSG and A4S International, then were dispatched to frontlines across West Asia.

From internal repression to regional conquest

The UAE’s first contract with Blackwater in 2010 focused on protecting the sheikhdom. MbZ, skeptical of his own army’s loyalty, brought in foreign officers to secure palaces, oil infrastructure, and suppress dissent. These mercenaries tortured political detainees, maintained weapons systems, and served as a Praetorian Guard for the Emirati elite.

The Cradle for more

by AJAMU BARAKA

Poverty is an artificial creation. Join political activist and Black Agenda Report’s contributing editor Ajamu Baraka and members of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya on a trip to Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. It is symptomatic of a larger issue because, despite Nairobi being the wealthiest county in Kenya, contributing 27% of the country’s GDP, 60% of its 5 million residents live in squalor across 200 slums. Successive governments since independence have done little to change the status quo, leaving the people to predatory organizations that, at best, provide a band-aid to a gaping wound, or at worst, serve to depoliticize the masses.

Black Agenda Report & North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights have come together to re-release African Stream’s Mini-Doc: “Inequality in Kenya: View from Kibera,” which can be seen on the Black Agenda Report YouTube Channel.

Re-Release Premiere
August 28th • 7PM EST
August 29th • 10AM EST

Black Agenda Report for more

by JACKLIN KWAN

A survey of Scientific American’s century of quantum coverage helps explain the enduring popularity of strange physics

This year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, according to UNESCO, marking 100 years since quantum mechanics was proposed. The theory hardly needed the extra publicity, though.

Look at any science magazine’s trending articles and there’s a good chance quantum stories will be among the top rankings. Cute animals aside, quantum physics might be science fans’ favorite cover story. But why?

I’m a science journalist with a physics degree, and this question fascinates me. It’s not obvious why the public is so enraptured with quantum physics, a field that is notoriously difficult to explain and even more challenging to connect to everyday experience. Yet what I call the “quantum fixation” has prevailed almost since the theory originated.

I had the opportunity to research the perennial popularity of quantum physics for my master’s dissertation in science communication, and I chose to dive into the archives of Scientific American in search of an answer. As the U.S.’s oldest continually published magazine—180 years now—it is one of the few publications old enough to have witnessed the birth of the quantum age and has helped introduce it to the public.

Over the course of a few months, I searched the archives for articles with any mention of the word quantum in the past 100 years of print coverage. In analyzing who wrote these articles, what they chose to write about and how they conveyed the often-confusing quantum world to general readers, I hoped to discover what the public found so compelling about quantum physics.

It turns out that what draws us to quantum physics are the same things its founders found repulsive about it.

Quantum Beginnings

You have to feel sorry for quantum mechanics sometimes. The scientists that founded it were among its harshest critics. In 1905 Albert Einstein first popularized the word quanta (derived from the Latin term for “how much”) to describe light as composed of discrete packets or bundles of energy known as photons.

Scientific American for more

by MOHAMED EL MOKHTAR

The Palestine Chronicle is not a militant organization. It is a modest, independent publication, sustained by small donations and animated by a singular mission: to bear witness. It tells the untold stories of Palestine, documenting dispossession, resistance, and the endurance of a people condemned to silence. In a media landscape dominated by powerful conglomerates repeating the language of governments, the Chronicle insists on a journalism of proximity — grounded in daily lives, in the rubble of Gaza, in voices otherwise erased. Its true offense, in the eyes of its detractors, is not invention but truth.

At the heart of this endeavor stands Ramzy Baroud. His career is the antithesis of clandestine. For decades he has written, taught, and spoken in public, producing books translated into multiple languages, contributing columns to international publications, addressing audiences in universities and public forums across continents. He is not a shadowy figure; he is a man whose work has been consistent, transparent, and intellectually rigorous. His life is not untouched by the tragedy he describes: many members of his family were killed under Israeli bombardments. Yet while mainstream media rushed to amplify unproven allegations against him, they remained deaf to his personal grief. His tragedy was ignored, his integrity overlooked, his voice distorted — because his engagement is unbearable to those who would prefer silence.

A Crime of Conscience, Not of Law

He is an engaged journalist in the noblest sense: independent, lucid, unflinching. His so-called crime is not collusion with violence but fidelity to memory. That is why he is demonized — not for what he has done in law, but for what he represents in conscience. America, unable to silence Palestinian voices through censorship alone, now instrumentalizes its justice system to achieve by indictment what it failed to achieve by argument. Having harassed universities, intimidated students, and punished professors for their solidarity with Gaza, it turns the courtroom into a new battlefield. And Congress, captive to the whims of its Zionist masters, joins the manhunt, targeting a journalist for the sole offense of telling the truth of his people. As for the mainstream press, it chooses cowardice: ignoring his family’s suffering, ignoring the emptiness of the charges, while echoing the accusations of power as if they were evidence.

Law Twisted into Weapon

The complaint filed against Ramzy Baroud and the organization (People Media Project) that runs the Palestine Chronicle rests on the Alien Tort Statute, grotesquely overstretched to criminalize editorial decisions rather than acts of war. It alleges that by publishing articles from Abdallah Aljamal — described by Israel as a Hamas operative killed during a hostage rescue — the Chronicle “aided and abetted” terrorism. But here lies the first fissure: this characterization of Aljamal comes exclusively from Israeli military sources, themselves a belligerent party. It has never been independently verified. The claim that he was both a journalist and a Hamas operative remains an allegation, not an established fact. To treat it as judicial evidence is to replace proof with propaganda.

Free Press for more

by LUKE KEMP

Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsides

No one walks among the wild goats and darting snakes of the mountain, its steppe where grew the succulent plants grew nothing but the reed of tears … Akkad is destroyed!

This lament is from the ‘Curse of Akkad’, a poem written about the fall of the Akkadian Empire, which reigned more than 4,000 years ago in the Near East. Yet it’s more myth than reality: despite the tragic language about a destroyed city, the capital of Akkad did not disappear. It was still occupied and, later, new kings took over its rule: the Third Dynasty of Ur. That empire fell too, eventually, and is also remembered through literature written years after its demise: ‘The malicious storm which swept over the Land, the storm which destroyed cities, the storm which destroyed houses … the storm which cut off all that is good from the Land.’ This natural disaster was apparently caused by Enlil, the god of the winds. Yet there’s no archaeological evidence for this.

In fact, as far as we can tell, life continued normally for citizens of Akkad and Ur. As the archaeologist Guy Middleton points out in Understanding Collapse (2017), the empires may have died, but the average person might not have even noticed.

Until recently, many archaeologists focused on revealing the cultural glories and dynastic power of such civilisations. The Akkadians left us cuneiform records (writing inscribed with reeds onto clay) and staggering ziggurats (massive, terraced, flat-topped temples). And Ur-Namma, the first king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, left us the earliest known legal code. This means that popular perceptions of many past empires, such as Rome or the Qin, focus on their great artwork and monumental achievements, such as the Colosseum or the Great Wall of China.

In recent years, many archaeologists and historians have taken a different approach, asking: what was it like as an ordinary person to live through these imperial collapses? You may assume that a collapse in the imperial superstructure meant that people went hungry and homeless, and that is certainly the picture in the poems of lamentation and sorrow. But the physical evidence of people’s health, for instance, shows something very different.

Aeon for more

by BOAVENTURA De SOUSA SANTOS

Introduction

History teaches us that major social transformations have always occurred in the wake of two types of traumatic social upheavals: war and revolution. Although the sequence between war and revolution varies, the two social upheavals tend to occur in the same historical process of major social transformation, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. At the end of the historical process, it will be clear that neither war nor revolution alone could have explained the transformation that took place. Both war and revolution are human products and, as such, subject to risk and uncertainty, to the possibility and ambiguity of both success and failure, to a mixture of passion and reason, animality and spirituality, the desire to be and not to be, experiences of despair and hope. In both war and revolution, the meaning of history runs parallel to the absurdity of history, and its failures always circulate in the underground of its successes.

War and revolution are so complex and take so many forms that those who want to promote them rarely achieve what they set out to do, and those who want to prevent them are rarely able to do so effectively or without self-destruction. The social trauma they cause stems from the abrupt violence they involve, which can be destructive to lives and institutions, and often to both. The difference between war and revolution is most visible in their antidotes. The antidote to war in the contemporary era is peace, while the antidote to revolution is counter-revolution. The antidotes reveal the character of the social forces involved in both war and revolution. Those who want peace are the social classes that suffer most from war. Those who die in wars are soldiers and innocent citizens, not the politicians who decide them or the generals who command them. Both the soldiers who choose war or are forced to fight it and the innocent citizens most vulnerable to the risk of death belong to the historically less privileged social classes, members of the working classes, such as peasants and factory workers. On the contrary, those who want war are the social classes that run the least risk from the destruction it can cause and stand to gain the most from what follows destruction. Those who promote counterrevolution are the powerful minority social classes that benefit most from the status quo that revolution seeks to destroy. On the contrary, those who promote revolution are the exploited, oppressed, and discriminated social groups and classes who, despite being in the majority, find no other means than revolution to end the injustice of which they are victims.

Both war and revolution are extreme forms of class struggle, constituting an open struggle between life and death. But while war involves the death of the majority to defend the life of the minority, revolution involves the death of the minority to defend the life of the majority. The social and political forces that promote war are the same ones that promote counterrevolution. On the contrary, the social and political forces that promote revolution also promote peace, even if this may imply war against minorities (the so-called revolutionary war that marks many of the political trajectories of liberation in the global South).

Z Network for more

by MARCO D’ERAMO

It would be laughable if it were not so tragic. For at least four reasons.

1. The full-throated defence of globalization by a left that previously characterized it as the source of every human misfortune. Having deplored the indiscriminate opening of markets for thirty years, it is now tearing its hair out because that opening is being rescinded, as the American empire proceeds with deglobalization (a process that has been underway for the past decade). It might be recalled that for years left-wing economists regarded the trade protectionism of the Cambridge School as a guiding light.

2. The carefree jubilation with which Europe met German rearmament, heedless of the country’s last two military build-ups and their disastrous consequences for the world. Blithe cheerfulness also met news that Chancellor Friedrich Merz was deploying the 45th Armoured Division in Lithuania – Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, which tells the story of how the Teutonic Knights were (fortunately) driven back from this very region, had seemingly been forgotten.

3. Europe’s anguish as it realizes that it has somehow (no one quite knows where or how) lost its umbrella. A feigned anguish, considering that in all of Donald Trump’s outbursts, this subject has been conspicuous by its absence: not once has the US president threatened to scale back American bases in Europe, nor has he raised the possibility of removing its hundred-odd nuclear bombs, nor the approximately one hundred thousand troops it has kept stationed on the continent for more than half a century. No matter: European leaders wring their hands, regardless of the persistent silence. My God, they cry, we have no umbrella to protect us from the storms on the horizon. At the very least, we are in urgent need of a raincoat.

4. Speaking of raincoats, witness the chest-thumping virility with which France and Great Britain flex their modest nuclear muscles, striking a pose of proud independence from a United States now weary of the Old Continent, and urging other European countries to spend more on weapons. This is, of course, precisely what Trump had ordered of his vassals: raise military spending to at least 3% of GDP, and then 5%. The only way to achieve this is by slashing social expenditure – schools, healthcare and so on. In other words, in the name of bellicose continental independence, the European ‘powers’ are rushing to force their citizens to swallow the diktat of Washington.

Today, the tragicomic seems the only register in which to narrate contemporary events, such is the gulf between proclamation and action. To narrate, not understand, much less predict: unpredictability appears the sole constant of the period, the only forecast that can be made with any certainty.

***

Interpretations of Trumpism – distinct, of course, from Trump himself – tend to oscillate between two pairs of opposites: minimalist/maximalist and declinist/anti-declinist. In a recent Sidecar article, Matthew Karp describes the poles of the first with great clarity:

Maximalists are inclined to view Trump as an agent or conduit of a sudden historical rupture, whether the transformation of the party system, the destruction of American democracy or the implosion of the liberal world order. Minimalists see Trump not as a fundamental break but rather as a lurid symbol of longer-running developments, or a symptom of crises that lie elsewhere?– a black hole detracting attention from real political problems.

For Karp, this dichotomy cuts across both left and right:

Despite some disagreement, liberal and conservative maximalists unite in seeing the President himself as the chief and often the only issue in national politics; both have also leapt to enlist in the “fascism wars”, often brandishing the F-word as a cudgel to discipline the left at elections, and elsewhere.

Minimalism, on the other hand, is the stance adopted by both Republican and Democratic leaderships, which are united in the strategy of ‘ha da passare la nottata’, that is, of waiting for the Trumpian storm to blow over. The former are using it to notch up a few of the right’s traditional goals – tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization of state services, a shower of public contracts. The Democrats, for their part, highlight inconsistencies, reversals and blunders, wielding them as weapons for a (hoped-for) electoral comeback in next year’s midterms. But both sides are united in supine, bipartisan acquiescence: Republicans swallowing without protest the coup Trump carried out within the Grand Old Party, Democrats enduring the institutional offensive – total disempowerment of the legislative branch – without even engaging in a little parliamentary obstruction in the form of filibustering.

New Left Review for more

by JESSICA MATHEWS

It was February 2024 when Noland Arbaugh, the first person to get Elon Musk’s experimental brain chip, rolled across the stage in a wheelchair during a Neuralink “all hands” meeting, revealing his identity for the first time.

The room, filled with Neuralink employees, erupted in applause as Arbaugh—who dislocated two of his vertebrae in a swimming accident in 2016 and has since lost sensation and movement below his shoulders—smiled ear to ear in his chair, a red Texas A&M hat planted on his head. He grinned as he began to speak: “Hello, humans.”

About a month before that town hall, Arbaugh, who’s 31, had undergone surgery at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, about 2.5 hours from his home in Yuma, to get an experimental chip embedded into his brain that Neuralink had been working on and testing on animals for the past nine years. Arbaugh was anesthetized and, in a surgery that lasted just under two hours, a Neuralink-made robotic surgery device implanted the chip and connected tiny threads with more than 1,000 electrodes to the neurons in his brain. Now the device can measure electrical activity, process signals, then translate those signals into commands to a digital device. In layman’s speak, the BCI, or brain-computer interface, allows Arbaugh to control a computer with his mind. As a result, Arbaugh can do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body.

The first day that Arbaugh used his device, he beat the 2017 world record for speed and precision in BCI cursor control. “It was very, very easy to learn how to use,” he tells me in an interview.

When Arbaugh became Participant 1—or “P1” as he is often referred to by Neuralink employees and subsequent study participants—he joined a list of about 80 people to ever receive such a device. Brain chip interfaces have been a focus of neurological study for more than 50 years, and a dozen companies in the U.S. and China have been conducting limited human trials since 1998.

But becoming the first patient to get a Neuralink implant, in particular, is its own right of passage. For one, Neuralink’s device has threads with more than 1,000 electrodes, giving the device a much higher connectivity rate than most of the BCIs currently being studied in humans in the market. But Neuralink also places its electrodes in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement—a more invasive approach than competitors like Synchron or Precision Neuroscience, which also have ongoing studies of multiple patients. Neuralink’s device is also wireless, versus competitors like Blackrock Neurotech that require a wired connection from the implant through the skull to an external receiver for signal capture and decoding (Blackrock Neurotech sells a wireless processor that has been used for research). That means Neuralink participants can go cordless, but the device is battery powered because of it and does need to be charged around every five hours or so, Arbaugh says. Neuralink heat-treats the charger, a coil, into some of Arbaugh’s hats, so that he can recharge it while wearing a hat. In the beginning, Arbaugh couldn’t use the device while it charged, though that’s since been updated.

Yahoo for more

by ANA VRACAR

Croatia’s journalists’ union and professional association mobilized against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, condemning the targeted killing of Palestinian reporters.

“It is time to show that unions, as the most important force for workers, know how to take responsibility and take a stand when terrible crimes unfold before our eyes,” the Trade Union of Croatian Journalists (SNH) wrote in a call to action. Together with the Croatian Journalists’ Association (HND), SNH appealed to other labor groups and the wider public to join a protest on August 28 in response to the genocide in Gaza and the deliberate killing of more than 240 Palestinian reporters.

SNH union leader and current president of the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), Maja Sever, told Peoples Dispatch that the importance of media workers speaking out about the ongoing genocide cannot be overstated. “The first and simplest reason is that there is currently a genocide happening, and that is why media workers must speak out,” Sever explained. “They have a key role in shaping public opinion, and when mainstream media relativizes or silences the violence against Gaza’s civilian population – when they silence the genocide – there is a danger of normalizing the war and occupation. That, in turn, risks enabling the continuation of the genocide and the destruction of the Palestinian people. Silence or neutrality in this case truly amounts to participation in covering up the crime.”

The killing of Gaza’s media workers, SNH and HND warned, has dangerous implications for press freedom more broadly as well. “Their deaths send a dangerous message: that the truth must not be heard,” the two organizations added in their announcement. “By blocking access to Gaza for foreign journalists, the Israeli military is silencing freedom of expression and the public’s right to know. We are witnessing the literal silencing of voices of truth, of journalists – by starving them to death.”

Silence during a genocide: a moral and political disgrace

In recent months, journalists’ associations in Croatia, particularly their trade union, have organized initiatives denouncing the targeting of reporters in the Gaza Strip. Among them was a collaborative project with local artists, who produced dozens of portraits of journalists killed by Israeli occupation forces since October 7, 2023. During Thursday’s action, union members, artists, and cultural workers carried these prints in a march toward the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where they reiterated demands for the Croatian government to act against the genocide.

Peoples Dispatch for more