by PASCAL LOTTAZ
Professor Richard Falk has been a TFF Associate for all the 40 years, TFF has existed. A dear friend, too. And now at soon 96, a world-leading brilliant thinker, a clear voice for law, peace, justice, decency and ethics.
Here is Richard’s blog, written since he turned 80.
He is interviewed by Pascal Lottaz, who is a TFF Board member and operates one of the finest peace-oriented channels: Neutrality Studies on YouTube and Rumble.
The Dissident Voice for more
by SAIF KHALID
Pakistan finds itself in a diplomatic sweet spot, wooed by Trump, China and the Middle East, despite India’s efforts. Indian missteps are partly to blame, say analysts.
Doha, Qatar – Thumping his fist on a lectern, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a direct challenge to the leaders of Pakistan.
“India has been successful in isolating you, and we will intensify those efforts,” he said, addressing a large rally of supporters in the southern Indian state of Kerala, as dusk set in. “We will make sure that you are isolated around the world.”
It was September 2016, and Modi was responding to an attack by armed fighters in Indian-administered Kashmir days earlier, in which 18 Indian soldiers had been killed. “The leaders of Pakistan should listen: The sacrifice of our 18 soldiers will not go in vain,” the Indian leader said.
Yet a decade later, Pakistan stands far from isolated: It is a close strategic ally of China, where the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, visited this week, and has reemerged as a trusted partner of the United States under President Donald Trump.
Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir and Sharif have both visited Trump at the White House over the past year. Islamabad is the principal mediator between the US and Iran amid their ongoing war. Trump has also frequently praised the Pakistani leadership.
In part, say analysts, that’s a reflection of Pakistan’s success in wooing Trump, and in capitalising on key geopolitical events to make itself an important diplomatic player for superpowers and regional players alike. But equally, say analysts, Pakistan’s growing diplomatic stature underscores missteps by Modi’s administration.
“Certainly, India’s strategy of undercutting and indeed isolating Pakistan, regionally and globally, has backfired in a big way,” Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow on South Asia at the Atlantic Council think tank, told Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera for more
by B. R. GOWANI
Where is Uncle Abe?
under foreign occupation
under foreign rule
Palestine
one day me and my boyfriend
sitting outside his house
planning marriage
unaware of curfew hours
got caught
not by the family members
but the occupiers
the Israeli soldiers
one soldier shouted:
“what the hell are you doing here?”
my friend replied:
“this is our home”
then asked:
“what are you doing here?”
another soldier said:
“this is our God-given land”
he fired
my friend was no more
I screamed and fainted
eyes opened
I was a victim
I had been violated
they were laughing
they were screaming:
“you Muslim pig
this is a gift from Yahweh
remember Yahweh, not Allah”
back home
home was no more
no more was the family
the occupiers
looking for a “terrorist”
had blown up a neighborhood
pregnant
people advised
refused abortion
no where to go
sympathetic voice
talk of self-sufficiency
ended up in Saudi Arabia
a sheikh’s harem
raped and beaten
tried to escape
was called
“adulteress”
taunted about my femaleness
Koranic verses were quoted
Allah was invoked
flogged severely
in the name of Allah
the only joy
was the weight
the growth in the womb
this time I made it
a white gentleman from US
helped in getting the US visa
arrived
breathed a heavy sigh of relief
away from Yahweh
away from Allah
three months passed
one sunny morning
was on my way to work
saw few white men
in front of a small building
they saw me
one yelled:
“is Iranian leader Saddam bin Laden
your brother?”
another u-turned him
seemed they had a higher goal
they shouted:
“abortion is murder
Jesus loves life
Bible prohibits”
then they threw something
it exploded
ended up in hospital
lost the baby
who would have been
a mixture of Allah and Yahweh
but was blown up by Christian God
my yet unborn baby was
a killer of my bitterness
a soother of my pain
a solace of my loneliness
it was not to be
out of hospital
out of joy
out of hope
into more depression
into more misery
into more frustration
philosophy of life changed
belief in Supreme Being changed
found a friend
from the world of art
a South Asian girl
Rishma Smita Manto
neither Hindu nor Muslim
nor Sikh, Christian, Buddhist
simply a humanist
self-confident
needing no
gods, goddesses, or God
master of her own destiny
planner of her own fate
writer of her own Kismet
she was trying hard
to cheer me up
after some time
she succeeded
how?
by telling a joke
she had heard back home:
“a big music show
lots of people
music was bad
singers were worst
people started leaving
some threw slippers
one from the audience
ran on to the stage
musicians escaped
singer couldn’t
asked for forgiveness
begged to be spared
very humbly, spectator said:
don’t worry!
relax!
nothing against you
won’t do anything to you
won’t even touch you
I have just one request
just show me the person
who brought you here?”
I thought:
“all this time
wrong guys I was blaming
nothing against them
the brothers
the trinity”
Jesus, Mohammad, Moses (in alphabetical order)
Moses, Jesus, Mohammad (in timeline order)”
Jesus, Mohammad, Moses (in planetary violence)
Mohammad, Jesus, Moses (individual violence)
Moses, Jesus, Mohammad (regional violence)
now who am I looking for?
Uncle Abe
Uncle Abraham
Uncle Ibrahim
all one and the same
the real culprit
(The above is a slightly modified version of the piece first written on December 8, 2002.)
<1> Hagar, according to the Bible, was Egyptian. Egypt is in Africa but Hagar in the painting done by a Dutch European painter turned Hagar and the child Ishmael into white people. At least Abraham’s color remained brown.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear reader,
There is an old, almost ritual question that journalism schools across the world have been asking for a generation now, and it is one I have answered in my head a thousand times. The question is built around a single photograph. You know the one. A frail child, slumped on the cracked Sudanese earth in March 1993, and behind the child a hooded vulture, patient and focussed. The picture appeared in The New York Times on March 26, 1993. Looking at it then, many assumed the child was a girl. It was not until 2011, when reporters from the Spanish daily El Mundo went looking for the family, that the world learned the child was a boy named Kong Nyong, and that he had survived that day, by walking to the UN feeding centre at Ayod, only to die years later, in 2007, of fever. The picture was made by Kevin Carter, a 32-year-old from Johannesburg who belonged to the small, hard-drinking, hard-working group of photojournalists known as the Bang-Bang Club. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1994. Four months later, Carter was dead.
The question journalism teachers like to put before their students is this: what should the news photographer do? Save the child from the vulture or click the photograph?
My answer is unfashionable, and I suspect most working photographers will agree. Click the damn photograph. A published image can mobilise a million strangers; a single act of rescue can save one. That is the cold, unsentimental arithmetic, and almost every honest photojournalist I have spoken to over the years has accepted it without flourish. It is also, in a deeper sense, a Marxian arithmetic—the recognition that an individual gesture of charity, however brave, cannot substitute for the systemic intervention that a wide public conscience can compel. Carter knew this. The day his picture ran, the New YorkTimes was flooded with letters and calls. Donations poured into aid agencies. The image was reprinted on fundraising posters from Toronto to Tokyo. The photograph did what war correspondents and relief agencies could not do—it made the famine visible.
Frontline for more
by FOUZIA NASIR AHMAD
We don’t just speak English in Pakistan—we bend it, remix it, and make it our own
Have you noticed that when we speak English with our families and friends, it often sounds like a direct translation of Urdu, and yet everyone understands perfectly. It is quite different from when we speak English with a British or American person, where we subconsciously try to fine tune our accent and select our vocabulary more carefully. After all, they probably wouldn’t understand “time pass” or “chill scene”, would they!
Over decades, English in Pakistan has evolved into a distinct variety known as desi English by blending it with Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, and Gujrati, creating a unique hybrid of vocabulary, syntax, and cultural idioms. Urdu, already an amalgam of several languages, is very absorbent and accommodating with words from other languages. This is not only because of some 50 plus alphabets and phonic sounds in Urdu, but also because the people speaking it have a natural flair and flamboyance to pick up words and phrases from other languages.
This evolution includes high rates of code-switching, the adoption of regional cultural nuances, and the creation of new lexical terms influenced by local politics, cuisine, and military jargon, reflecting a shift toward a local “nativised” identity. Some English words are so commonly used in Urdu, these are almost Urdu words, for instance spicy, relax, smart.
This “Pakistanisation” of English is driven by media, social media, and a young generation adopting it as a vibrant, living language rather than a rigid foreign language.
English in Pakistan is more than just a language—it is a lasting imprint of colonial rule that continues to shape who gets ahead. From classrooms to corridors of power, it quietly draws lines between privilege and exclusion. Though rooted in the British era, English remains the gatekeeper of opportunity, dominating official communication and access to education, influence, and upward mobility. In a country where fluency often signals intelligence and social standing, it reinforces a divide between those who possess it and those who do not, carrying forward colonial hierarchies into the present.
Express Tribune for more
by ILARIA ROSELLA PAGLIARO
Stratos project promises AI power in Utah desert, but water scarcity, heat output equivalent to 23 atomic bombs daily, and massive emissions spark concern.
In the Utah desert, artificial intelligence looks far less immaterial than we like to tell ourselves: gas, pipes, fans, contested water, and a valley at risk of becoming even hotter. The project is called Stratos and is planned for Box Elder County, north of the Great Salt Lake, the large salt lake that has been at the center of a severe environmental crisis for years.
On paper, it’s a campus to power cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and defense-related operations. In practice, it’s a gigantic infrastructure: the total area indicated in official documents reaches about 40,000 acres, over 16,000 hectares (39,500 acres), although authorities specify that much of the land would remain open and that the data center would occupy only a fraction of the area. The project has received approval from Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority and Box Elder County, but the path remains long: environmental authorizations, air permits, water permits, discharge permits, and water rights are still needed.
A 9-gigawatt machine
The number that made environmentalists, residents, and scientists jump out of their seats is this: 9 gigawatts. According to available estimates, Stratos would consume an enormous amount of energy, almost double Utah’s peak electricity demand recorded in 2025. Promoters explain that the facility would produce energy directly on-site, using natural gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline, so as not to burden the local electrical grid, meaning residents’ homes wouldn’t have to compete with servers for electricity.
But the heat remains. Because a data center of that size doesn’t just consume energy: it returns it to the environment as heat. Robert Davies, a physicist at Utah State University, estimated a total thermal load of about 16 gigawatts, adding together the energy needed for the data center and the waste heat from the gas plant. In more brutal terms, the equivalent of 23 atomic bombs per day dumped into the local environment. A strong comparison, certainly. But it serves a simple purpose: to strip the cloud of that clean veneer of a lightweight word. Here the cloud would have turbines, gas, industrial fans, and boiling air.
According to the same preliminary analysis, the system could raise temperatures in Hansel Valley by 2-5 degrees Fahrenheit (1-3°C) during the day and 8-12 degrees Fahrenheit (4-7°C) at night. Warm nights in arid environments are a serious problem: nighttime cooling helps moisture condensation, a small vital reserve for plants, soils, and animals. If that margin also disappears, the desert becomes even more desert-like.
Water, gas, and dust
Project promoters insist on one point: Stratos would use a closed-loop cooling system, with fluid circulating in sealed pipes and being reused. Official documents mention water used mainly for initial filling and maintenance, without continuous withdrawal. The water would come from existing private water rights and, according to authorities, not from the Great Salt Lake.
Green Me Mag for more
by DAN BEETON
A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) finds that the expansion of US sanctions against Cuba beginning in 2017 were likely the primary cause of a major increase in infant mortality in Cuba. The report, by Alexander Main, Joe Sammut, Mark Weisbrot, and Guillaume Long examines the unprecedented increase in Cuba’s infant mortality rate (IMR), which soared by 148 percent from 2018 to 2025. During this time, US unilateral economic coercive measures against Cuba were greatly tightened by President Trump and then largely maintained under President Biden before being tightened even further during the second Trump administration. Had Cuba’s IMR remained stable over the last eight years, then approximately 1,800 deaths of infants would not have occurred.
“The Trump policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Cuba has killed a lot of babies — and, although we don’t yet have data for the last few months, it’s highly likely that more babies are dying now, and at an even higher rate than last year as a result of the current US fuel blockade targeting Cuba,” CEPR Director of International Policy and report coauthor Alexander Main said. “The question is how many more babies will have to die before the current economic siege against Cuba is lifted.”
The report notes that “In Cuba, where for decades the state has invested substantially in health care services, the IMR was … among the lowest in the Western Hemisphere, and lower than in the US,” but that “Since 2018 … Cuba’s IMR has increased from an annual rate of 4.0 per 1000 live births to a rate of 9.9 as of 2025.”
The paper also notes that Cuba, unlike its neighbors in the region, has not rebounded economically from the COVID-19 pandemic, averaging just 0.4 percent annual per capita GDP growth from 2020 to 2024, versus 3.2 percent for the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole.
The report looks at the economic and social effects of the hardening of US sanctions since 2017, focusing in particular on the impact on Cuba’s health-care sector. Trump administration pressure on Cuba has included restrictions that have sharply diminished the island’s important tourism sector; severely limited exports of goods to Cuba — including essential medication and medical equipment; cut Cuba’s access to international financial markets by putting the country back on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list; curbed remittances; pressured countries to end their partnerships with Cuba’s medical missions, and notably imposed a recent fuel blockade that prevents Venezuelan oil from reaching the island.
“US sanctions have targeted Cuba’s key sources of export earnings, such as tourism, remittances from Cuban Americans to their family members, and even by putting pressure on other countries to end primary care programs staffed by Cuban doctors. These measures sharply reduced Cuba’s capacity to pay for needed food and medicines,” CEPR International Research Fellow and coauthor Joe Sammut said. “Cutting off medical services exports is doubly cruel as these programs mostly serve marginalized communities in poorer countries, while bringing in foreign currency revenues to Cuba in a mutually beneficial trade. As such the increasing US sanctions have a negative health-care spillover even beyond the island of 10 million people.”
As the report discusses, recent research has shown that unilateral, broad economic sanctions are as deadly as armed conflict, killing some 564,000 people annually, according to a study by CEPR economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot published in August in The Lancet Global Health. More than half of these deaths are children under five, and deaths of infants are even more disproportionate, since they are three-quarters of the under-five population.
“The sanctions on Cuba starkly illustrate how these economic sanctions work: they target the civilian population, often with the goal of provoking regime change,” said Mark Weisbrot, CEPR Co-Director. “This can dramatically increase death rates, as shown statistically in the Lancet Global Health study of economic sanctions throughout the world. The increased mortality in Cuba fits this pattern, and the causality is visible.”
The US Senate may vote as early as Tuesday, April 28, on a War Powers Resolution introduced by Senators Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff, and Ruben Gallego to “to prevent [US] Armed Forces from engaging in hostilities [against Cuba] unless authorized by Congress.”
“This legislation pending in Congress right now argues persuasively that the current blockade constitutes a military participation in hostilities that is unlawful according to the US Constitution and law because it has not been authorized by Congress,” Weisbrot said.
“The collective punishment of civilians is prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention when there is armed conflict, and can be prosecuted as a war crime. This would appear to be applicable now that the current naval blockade involves the US military.”
Links for more
by PETER YEUNG
How one Mexican city struggles against big industry for water
San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico – The famous red and white logo can be seen on almost every street.
It is painted on the front of mom-and-pop stores. It is on the side of delivery vans and 18-wheeler trucks. It even appears stamped on the sides of bottles being drunk by toddlers.
But the ubiquitous branding for the Coca-Cola company is not just a sign of its popularity in the Mexican city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, nestled in the highlands of Chiapas. Some say it is also a sign of peril.
Coca-Cola is Mexico’s most popular drink, racking up billions of dollars worth of sales each year.
But climate change is forcing communities like San Cristóbal into a painful reckoning with Coca-Cola and other multinational businesses that use huge amounts of water to make their products.
“Water flows toward the money and to companies like Coca-Cola, not to the people,” said Fermin Reygadas, the director of Cántaro Azul, a San Cristóbal-based nonprofit that helps supply clean water to rural villages in Chiapas.
San Cristóbal, a city of 200,000 people, is home to a bottling plant run by Femsa, a food and drink conglomerate with rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in much of Latin America.
It has permits to extract more than 300,000 gallons of water, or about 1.14 million litres, every day from the nearby Huitepec volcano basin.
But that demand has led to severe water stress. Although Chiapas has the most water per capita in all of Mexico, more than one in three people in rural areas do not have access to running water.
More broadly, Mexico is projected to face water shortages in 20 of its 32 states by the year 2050 as a result of climate change and severe drought.
Already, as of 2020, 11 states suffer from water scarcity. The country’s capital, Mexico City, is at risk of reaching “day zero” — a term used to describe the complete loss of water from taps.
As a result, conflicts over water rights have flared between locals and companies like Coca-Cola and the French multinational Danone.
In the state of Puebla, for instance, Indigenous activists have occupied a Danone-owned bottling plant in protest of the nearly 1.4 million litres it extracts from the local aquifer.
Critics blame the industrial extraction for the growth of a sinkhole nearly 400 feet — or 122 metres — wide, though the company has denied any connection.
Al Jazeera for more
by MUZAN ALNEEL & GUSSAI H. SHEIKHELDIN
As debates on industrial policy revive, Nyerere’s legacy offers a critical archive of both the promise and limits of socialist development.
This article was originally published by the Transnational Institute (TNI). Since its publication, one of its co-authors, Muzan Alneel, has sadly passed away at the age of 39. A Sudanese writer, researcher, and activist, Muzan was a sharp and generous thinker whose work bridged political economy, revolutionary praxis, and Global South solidarities. As TNI notes in its obituary, her passing is a profound loss to movements for justice and self-determination across Sudan and beyond.
Muzan also wrote for Africa Is a Country in 2021, contributing to our coverage of Sudan’s revolution. We republish this piece in her memory, and in recognition of a body of work that continues to illuminate the struggles she was part of.
Throughout the past century the nations of the Global South have grappled with the persistent and evolving challenges of development. Forged in a shared crucible of colonial, imperialist, and neocolonial exploitation, these states, since the early years of their political independence (1950s and 1960s), have faced challenges securing material well-being for their populations and establishing the economic foundation for genuine political sovereignty. The late African scholar of development and heterodox economist Thandika Mkandawire outlined five “historical tasks” for the governments of newly independent African states: “complete decolonization of the continent, nation-building, economic and social development, democratization, and regional cooperation.”
Since attaining political independence, the contours of these developmental challenges were shaped by the exigencies of each distinct historical period. This started with an urgent need to generate revenue for development, followed by the volatility of the global commodity markets and then to the coercive pressures of the international financial institutions (IFIs). The respective responses came in shifts of strategic paradigms. We saw the years of extractive and primary commodity dependency followed by a wave of state-led industrialization and public investments during the early post-independence years of the 1960s and 1970s. This was then systematically dismantled by the Washington Consensus in the 1980s and 1990s, which imposed liberalization and market fundamentalism with catastrophic consequences. The profound failures of the neoliberal project has in turn revitalized discussion around strategic state interventions and South–South economic collaborations. In the wake of these changes, there is renewed engagement with industrial policy, a concept once considered heretical under neoliberal orthodoxy.
Africa is a country for more