by HAKEEM NAJEEMDEEN

The Safe Schools Initiative will keep falling short until the lack of security beyond school grounds is confronted.

“I am profoundly happy,” Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said after security forces rescued 39 pupils and six teachers who had spent 56 days in captivity. Gunmen had abducted them from three schools in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State on May 15.

Their rescue brought immense relief. But it also exposed a deeper failure: More than 12 years after the Chibok abduction prompted Nigeria to make schools safer, dozens of pupils and teachers could still be seized from their schools and held for nearly two months.

On April 14, 2014, Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno State in northeastern Nigeria. The attack captured the world’s attention and became a defining moment in Nigerian history. It led the United Nations, global business leaders and the Nigerian government to launch the Safe Schools Initiative (SSI) the following month, initially covering 500 schools in the northeastern states.

The Oyo abduction, therefore, did more than bring school safety back to the top of the national agenda. It raised serious questions about what the initiative has achieved and whether protecting school grounds alone can keep children safe while a lack of security continues beyond them.

On paper, SSI provides for school perimeter fencing, access control and enhanced security infrastructure as well as local guards and security personnel, community-based early-warning systems, the relocation of at-risk students to safer schools, psychosocial support for survivors and temporary learning centres in camps for internally displaced people.

Since then, Nigeria’s safe-schools framework has been expanded to include all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. Some states, such as Lagos and Ogun, have adapted and strengthened its implementation by introducing safety audits and establishing safety committees.

Yet nationally, the initiative has fallen far short of its promise. In June, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project called for an investigation into allegations that funds allocated to SSI had been mismanaged or diverted amid scrutiny of the 145-billion-naira ($106m) financing plan.

According to data in Nigeria’s National Plan on Financing Safe Schools, more than 42,000 primary and secondary schools across northern Nigeria lacked perimeter fencing. The gap between the initiative’s funding commitments and conditions on the ground has raised questions about how SSI has been managed. In July, the Nigerian House of Representatives ordered a comprehensive assessment of the initiative and the national plan, including the use of funds allocated to school-safety measures.

Despite the initiative, attacks on schools and abductions of students and teachers have continued. Thousands of Nigerian students have been abducted by armed groups since 2014. A media tally recorded the abduction of at least 603 students and teachers in seven mass attacks from March 2024 to May 2026 alone.

The consequences extend beyond those directly abducted. In many affected areas, a persistent lack of security has forced schools to remain closed, depriving children of their educations. On July 9, the Kebbi State government reiterated that schools in communities affected by banditry would remain closed until security improved, about seven months after the policy was introduced.

Al Jazeera for more

by CHARLES K. ARMSTRONG

The American Air War and the Destruction of North Korea

The Korean War, a “limited war” for the US and UN forces, was for Koreans a total war. The human and material resources of North and South Korea were used to their utmost. The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces.¹ The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others.  American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea —  that is, essentially on North Korea –including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.² The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.³

The act which inflicted the greatest loss of civilian life in the Korean War by far, one which the North Koreans have claimed ever since was America’s greatest war crime, was the aerial bombardment of North Korean population centers.  American control of the skies over Korea was overwhelming. Soviet MIGs, flown by Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean pilots, were sometimes effective against American air power. But under Stalin’s orders, the Soviet fighter planes were strictly limited in number and in the range they were allowed to fly, lest US-Soviet air battles lead to a larger war.⁴ And in any case, Soviet air support did not come until the end of 1950. During the summer and fall, North Korean air defenses were virtually non-existent.  Lightly armed, local self-defense units in occupied South Korea could only watch and suffer as their towns and villages were obliterated from the air.⁵ By the end of the war, North Korea claimed that only two modern buildings remained standing in Pyongyang.

For the Americans, strategic bombing made perfect sense, giving advantage to American technological prowess against the enemy’s numerical superiority. The American command dismissed British concerns that mass bombardment would turn world opinion against them, insisting that air attacks were accurate and civilian casualties limited.⁶ Russian accusations of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets did not register with the Americans at all. But for the North Koreans, living in fear of B-29 attacks for nearly three years, including the possibility of atomic bombs, the American air war left a deep and lasting impression. The DPRK government never forgot the lesson of North Korea’s vulnerability to American air attack, and for half a century after the Armistice continued to strengthen anti-aircraft defenses, build underground installations, and eventually develop nuclear weapons to ensure that North Korea would not find itself in such a position again. The long-term psychological effect of the war on the whole of North Korean society cannot be overestimated. The war against the United States, more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats that would continue long after the war’s end.

North Korea’s considerable economic achievements since liberation were all but completely wiped out by the war. By 1949, after two years of a planned economy, North Korea had recovery from the post-liberation chaos, and economic output had reached the level of the colonial period.⁷ Plans for 1950 were to increase output again by a third in the North, and the DPRK leadership had expected further economic gains following integration with the agriculturally more productive South after unification. According to DPRK figures, the war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes.⁸ Most of the destruction occurred in 1950 and 1951.  To escape the bombing, entire factories were moved underground, along with schools, hospitals, government offices, and much of the population. Agriculture was devastated, and famine loomed. Peasants hid underground during the day and came out to farm at night. Destruction of livestock, shortages of seed, farm tools, and fertilizer, and loss of manpower reduced agricultural production to the level of bare subsistence at best. The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referred to 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials,” a phrase revived in the famine years of the 1990s.⁹ Worse was yet to come. By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.¹⁰ Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine.

Asia-Pacific Journal — Japan Focus for more

by ROWAN JACOBSON

Rowan Jacobsen argues “In Defense of Sunlight” that moderation — not fear — should shape our attitudes toward exposure.

“Don’t leave home without sunscreen!” “No Tan Is Worth the Risk!” “Protect the Skin You’re In!” If you haven’t heard these sun protection slogans, you’ve certainly heard a litany of others. The current dermatological guidelines decree the sun’s rays as a harmful carcinogen, so if you must be outside, slather yourself in a protective layer of sunscreen, wear protective clothing, and seek shade during mid-day.

But just how much sun exposure should you get? That’s exactly the question that science journalist Rowan Jacobsen investigates in his new book, “In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure.” And the answer is just as complex as our relationship with our shimmering star.

Humans evolved under the sun, and until the Industrial Revolution, lived most of their lives outside. Recent research shows that once we retreated indoors, we may have actually lost a number of health benefits bestowed by sunshine, and not just the natural source of vitamin D that our bodies generate in its rays.

When the sun kisses our skin, the latter triggers the release or production of a series of other compounds vital to our health. One is nitric oxide, a tiny molecule that acts as a natural vasodilator that relaxes blood vessels, bringing down blood pressure. It’s “also used by the brain to transmit signals, and by the immune system to kill pathogens,” Jacobsen writes.

Some compounds set chain reactions in our bodies. “When our skin cells are exposed to sunlight, they produce a large molecule called proopiomelanocortin,” Jacobsen writes. Abbreviated as POMC, it’s a precursor to three essential chemicals. One of them prompts the production of melanin, Jacobsen writes, the dark pigment that helps protect the skin from burning, and

which is also “a powerful antioxidant that excels at mopping up the damage caused by the sun’s rays.” The second compound raises the level of cortisol, the stress hormone that has a bad reputation, but only if your body produces it continuously and for a long time, Jacobsen clarifies.

Undark for more

ARAMCO WORLD

In Islamesque Diana Darke argues that Europe’s most celebrated architecture, including the Palermo Cathedral in Sicily, owes its sophistication to cultural exchanges with forgotten Muslim craftsmen.

Historian Diana Darke had spent years puzzling over the zigzag designs that ran around the courtyard of her home in the old city of Damascus, Syria. Her neighbors dismissed it as decorative, but Darke couldn’t shake the feeling they meant something more.

One night, while watching a documentary, she discovered these zigzags were also the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for water, a pattern that first appeared as early as 4000 BCE and came to symbolize the water springs beneath Damascus itself. 

That moment led her on a journey to trace the motif across centuries and continents, from Coptic churches in Egypt to the dazzling facades of Palermo Cathedral in Sicily, where Arab craftsmen carved geometric precision and symbolic meaning into stone. In her latest book, Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments, she argues that Europe’s most celebrated architecture owes its sophistication to these cultural exchanges—hidden in plain sight, waiting to be read like the zigzags in her own Damascus courtyard.

You write in Islamesque of how many of Europe’s architectural masterpieces are rich with Arab influence. So, why choose to highlight the Palermo Cathedral?

The patterning of the exterior of the Palermo Cathedral at the east end shows a high level of skill. It’s like some immense piece of woven carpet with a taracea inlay, a very specific Islamic skill, where the black lava contrasts with the white limestone, and it makes these black-and-white patterns with eight-pointed stars. The geometry required to make a pattern like that over such a huge surface is just phenomenal. It is not the sort of thing that you learn in just a couple of generations.

Well, it would seem in this case almost 300 years, from the early ninth century CE to well past the second half of the 11th century. You write it took three Arab dynasties—the Aghlabids, the Fatimids and the Kalbids—to transform Sicily’s architectural landscape.

What became very clear to me during my research is that everything with architecture moves very slowly. And the only reason for some new, apparently sudden change is when new craftsmen come in. Even the buildings of Norman Sicily have a continuity from its predecessors because, of course, the Normans hired local Muslim craftsmen. They were basically between 150 and 200 years ahead of their time, and they dominated masonry, carpentry and metalwork, the three essential components of construction. 

But then the Norman conquest began in 1061 CE and the destruction of what was mostly built preceding it. Do you find it ironic that they then turned around and hired Arab craftsmen, engineers and masons to rebuild everything? 

My goodness, the quality of the palaces and the mosques that the Normans saw probably took their breath away in terms of sheer beauty of esthetics. They realized there was nothing close that their own craftsmen could produce. People think about Gothic architecture and assume it was completely inspired from Christian craftsmen. And what I’m trying to prove is that they only learnt their craft from the Muslims who came before them.

And yet most of the credit for these architectural marvels gets misplaced throughout history. How does that happen?

Aramco for more

by ZAIN HAQ

Building a megaproject like Diamar-Bhasha means losing thousands of years of Buddhist heritage

Many people in Pakistan are only just learning of Pakistan’s rich Buddhist heritage through sites like Taxila, the ancient Greco-Indian city one hour outside of Islamabad. However, there are other significant sites that are more remote and not as known, but equally significant in their historical significance. Recently, the United Nations Agency for Education and Culture warned the Government of Pakistan that Taxila could be placed on the list of “World Heritage in Danger” or even lose its world heritage status if Pakistan does not begin to pay serious attention to protecting the site from ruin and neglect.

Farther north of the country, thousands of years of Buddhist history is at threat by what some experts consider to be a needless and expensive project: the Diamar-Bhasha dam. The dam site is situated directly along the Silk Route, the ancient trade route that connected Central Asia, China, India, and Persia through centuries of trade and commerce, as well as a cross-pollination of ideas, culture, and religion. Along the ancient Silk Route and the upper Indus River, the area bordering Gilgit Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is home to several Buddhist stupas as well as tens of thousands of inscriptions, in the Brahmi, Tibetan and other ancient languages indigenous to the Indian subcontinent and the Tibetan Plateau. These are preserved carvings on rocks made by travellers over many centuries. But much of these inscriptions will be submerged once the Diamar Bhasha dam is up and running. This is, without a doubt, one of the most significant archeological sites in all of South Asia– and it is endangered.

Professors at the Wilfred Laurier-University in Waterloo, Ontario, Dr Jason Neelis and Dr Ali Zaidi share their expert opinion with The Express Tribune on the conflict of developing a hydropower station at the cost of losing Pakistan’s ancient heritage. “There are pressures that create conflicts between the value of preserving cultural heritage sites – or basically even the way of life of the people who inhabit these areas where the reservoir will be formed, which is resulting in a tremendous displacement– and the other needs for power, especially hydroelectricity, are more broadly needed to control water resources which Pakistan has in abundance in the most glaciated region outside of the polar ice caps. The challenge then is to balance the longer term control of this valuable resource which is going to be even more valuable in the future with a preservation of the past and knowledge of the past as well,” said Dr Neelis.

Pakistan has real challenges that have to be met when it comes to energy production, but increasingly experts point to how with every passing year, projects like the Diamar-Bhasha dam incur diminishing returns due to the increasing practicality of solar and wind.

He also pointed out a seldom discussed externality of what we call “tourism” or “development”, in remote communities. Intrusion by foreigners into previously secluded and self-sufficient communities has had an impact on the traditional role of women in some of these places. “A couple of years ago, we did a conference and we had some colleagues who had done work in Northern Pakistan. What they demonstrated was that development in Pakistan’s north, especially in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, actually had some unanticipated negative social consequences. They demonstrated how, prior to a road being constructed to a particular village, the women had more freedom because it was an isolated village. The women would go into the fields, they would do their daily work without the threat of strangers being there and so on.”

The Express Tribune for more

by RUWAYDA MUSTAFAH

For years, the day in Kulak ended when the generator powered down. Like thousands of villages across Iraq, this small farming community in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region lived to the faltering rhythm of an erratic power supply: a few hours of electricity, then the water pumps stopped, refrigerators warmed and children put down their books.

Today, Kulak runs on the sun. Solar panels harness its energy, batteries store the excess and residents have power 24/7. The change is visible beyond the homes: water pumps keep running, and cold storage gives farmers more control over when they sell their harvest.

This is the part of the energy transition the global climate conversation too often overlooks. Solar hardware is cheap; the world has learned how to install it. What matters is what comes after the panels go up: building the local capacity to keep the systems running and using reliable power to support farms, livelihoods and communities.

The energy transition will not be won in conference halls. It will be won, or lost, in places like Kulak.

Iraq’s rural energy crisis

Iraq’s energy story is usually told as a paradox. It is one of the world’s great oil producers, yet rural communities still endure daily power cuts. Summers now regularly push past 50 degrees, and the United Nations ranks Iraq among the nations most vulnerable to climate change. Drought has emptied farmland. Heat has made whole regions harder to live in. Rural families face a quiet, grinding choice between staying on land that can no longer sustain them or joining the drift towards overcrowded cities.

Al Jazeera for more

by B. R. GOWANI

a group of state attorneys general took Mark Zuckerbrg‘s Meta to court

charge: Meta’s social media sites harmed kids mentally & addicted them

the US states involved in the case hoped Meta would be fined $200 billion

Meta was fined merely $18 billion altogether

more than $459 million of that money is related to Cambridge Analytica

so only $17.5 billion fine is about child safety issue

in May 2012, Meta Platforms’s market capital was $81.74 billion

in 2026, it is $1,490 billion or $1.49 trillion — an increase of 1,717.09%

that is compound annual growth rate of 22.5%

$17.5 billion is just 1.17% of the market capital

it’s like a person who has $100 in his/her pocket is fined $1.17 cents

for doing great harm to children’s mental health and addicting them

Meta is one of those huge companies which is also poor to pay all at once

it’ll pay in 10 installments — so Meta will pay $1.75 billion every year

that is, a person with $100 will just pay less than 12 cents every year

that is the penalty …

for diverting 100s of millions of children from reading to watching

for spreading hatred and fear without any checks

for creating shame in children for their bodies

and so on

the fine is miniscule so the Meta shares rose 1% at the good news

how come? the company harmed children and the share price goes up!

$1.75 billion fine is nothing for Meta — it’s, as they say, peanuts

that is the wonderful thing with giant corporations

the CEOs or COOs or management people very rarely are thrown into jail

the companies are rarely shut down even for some time till it reforms

why? because Meta like companies are giant; they bribe politicians

bribe in the US, and in many other countries) is called “campaign moeny”

this thing was known from the beginning but was disregarded

people keep on raising issues but but not much happens

only when it became intolerable, the state governments intervened

beside, the governments & state/prov. governments have become weak

almost everywhere capitalists are running the governments

in India, a $2.3B loan was settled for $680,000 — 99.97% was forgiven <1>

Meta is one of those huge companies which also enjoys govt wealthfare

Zuckerberg’s Meta hires very little percentage of minorities

Meta’s Instagram used to connect pedophiles with content sellers

Note

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s friend Subhas Chandra of the Zee TV was responsible for Rs 220,000,000,000 or 22,000 crore rupees loans. Due to his inability to payback, according to him, NCLT (National Company Law Tribunal) let him pay just 65,000,000 or 6.5 crore — that is US $680,000, mere 0.03% of the total loan. Forgiving such a big percentage of loans is called “haircut.” The opposition Indian National Congress party’s MP Jairam Ramesh said it is not haircut but a mundan, that is total head shaving. (More on this loot, watch here and here.

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

by SONALI KOLHATKAR

Trump is flouting regulations to reap billions for himself, as ordinary Americans teeter on the edge of economic ruin.

President Donald Trump has brazenly engaged in what appears to be insider trading. A bombshell story published in Bloomberg on May 14, 2026, revealed that Trump made thousands of stock trades in the first quarter of this year with companies connected to the government. This isn’t fake news. Bloomberg analyzed publicly available information from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics regarding Trump’s financial disclosures—information that Trump was forced to divulge because of a government regulation called the STOCK Act.

Bloomberg summarized its findings, stating that “President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.”

Insider trading is blatantly illegal. Among the flood of Trump’s highly questionable, unethical, immoral, and criminal dealings, this one may be the most egregious.

The federal agency, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), defines insider trading as “buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, on the basis of material, nonpublic information about the security.” Perpetrators usually include corporate executives with inside information that gives them an edge on stock prices, enabling them to buy or sell to their advantage. But the SEC also singles out “Government employees who traded based on confidential information they learned because of their employment with the government.”

So blatant are Trump’s trades that a Bloomberg headline states they even “astonished” Wall Street insiders. But the White House dismissed the idea that Trump engaged in any wrongdoing by simply claiming that he “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.”

A USA Today report found that the president’s stock purchases “reflected a broad overlap of companies that Trump has promoted at the White House and on his trip to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping,” including stocks of Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. Executives of all three companies accompanied the president during his recent visit to China.

Trump is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars more than he was before his second term began, much of it through the buying and selling of cryptocurrency—yet another venture where he used his public office for personal gain. The New York Times explained, “Mr. Trump’s sale of crypto has been by far his biggest moneymaker, according to Reuters. People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret. A United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm announced plans last year to deposit $2 billion into a Trump firm—two weeks before the president gave the country access to advanced chips.”

The president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Donald Sherman, denounced the deal involving the sale of the chips as a “blatant, disgraceful conflict of interest and a possible violation of the Constitution’s Federal Emoluments Clause.”

LA Progressive for more

by J. F. MARTEL

When early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images

n 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.

These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.

Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity.

In 1819, John Keats completed ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, a poem that engages with ancient art in a totally different spirit from that of most modern archaeologists. Keats converses with the eponymous urn as though it were a living being rather than an object bequeathed to us by the dead, and this living being speaks in the language of beauty. Two centuries later, his conversation with the urn still leaves us with unresolved puzzles about the place of art in the world, most memorably with the closing words:

????When old age shall this generation waste,

??????????Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

????‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all

??????????Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

To modern minds, the idea that truth and beauty are somehow synonymous, that they might coincide at all, is likely to seem absurd. What do beauty and truth have to do with one another? If anything, isn’t beauty closer to untruth, given how frequently it deceives us?

A philosopher would answer that it depends on how we define our terms. The German filmmaker Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’. It is more interesting to him because it denotes what artists, poets and philosophers are (or should be) seeking. Ecstatic truth isn’t a label you slap onto accurate statements but an unrepeatable event that comes with the full force of revelation. It is new each time it occurs. There is something weird in it, something that evokes the mystery of existence.

Aeon for more