by MAX TELFORD

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our history.

But scientists are still puzzling over why we evolved into this particular form. Why do humans uniquely have a chin, for example? And why, relative to body weight, is a human testicle triple the size of a gorilla’s but a fifth of that of a chimpanzee? As I show in my new book, The Tree of Life, we are still searching for the answers to many of these “why” questions. But we are starting to find answers to some of them.

The story of evolution tells us how, starting from simple beginnings, each species was built, when each of the components that make a living creature was added to its blueprint. If we climb the evolutionary tree of life, we can follow a twisting path that visits the increasingly specialised branches that a species belongs to. We humans, for example, were animals before we became vertebrates; mammals before evolving into primates and so on.

The groups of species we share each of these branches with reveal the order our body parts appeared.

A body and a gut (inventions of the animal branch) must have come before backbone and limbs (vertebrate branch); milk and hair (mammals) came before fingernails (primates).

There is a way we can study the separate problem of just why we evolved each of these body parts, but it only works if the feature in question has evolved more than once on separate branches of the tree of life. This repeated evolution is called convergence. It can be a source of frustration for biologists because it confuses us as to how species are related. Swallows and swifts, for example, were once classified as sister species. We now know from both DNA and comparisons of their skeletons that swallows are really closer relatives of owls than swifts.

Size matters when it comes to evolution

But convergent evolution becomes something useful when we think of it as a kind of natural experiment. The size of primate testicles gives us a classic example. Abyssinian black and white colobus monkey and bonnet macaque adult males are roughly the same size. But, like chimps, humans and gorillas, these similar monkeys have vastly dissimilar testicles. Colobus testicles weigh just 3 grams. The testicles of the macaques, in contrast, are a whopping 48 grams.

You could come up with several believable explanations for their different testicle sizes. Large testicles might be the equivalent of the peacock’s tail, not useful per se but attractive to females. But perhaps the most plausible explanation relates to the way they mate. A male colobus monkey competes ferociously for access to a harem of females who will mate exclusively with him. Macaques, on the other hand, live in peaceful mixed troops of about 30 monkeys and have a different approach to love where everyone mates with everyone else: males with multiple females (polygamy) and females with multiple males (polyandry).

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by MAWADDA ISKANDAR

To fill their gaping intel void on Ansarallah, Tel Aviv and Washington have launched a covert intelligence war on Yemen. But a society steeped in resistance, coupled with Sanaa’s doctrine of silence, is proving far harder to breach than expected.

In October 2023, Yemen’s Ansarallah-aligned armed forces joined the battle in support of the Palestinian resistance’s Al-Aqsa Flood operation, and against Israel’s war on Gaza. Today, nearly two years on, a new battlefield has surfaced – far from the waters of the Red Sea or the skies of occupied Palestine. 

This war does not involve drones or ballistic missiles. It is a silent, persistent, and digital invasion aimed at prying open the Sanaa government’s internal cohesion through espionage, psychological manipulation, and soft-penetration tactics.

Phone calls from the occupation state 

The covert war began subtly. Mahmoud, a Yemeni journalist working with a local broadcaster, received a message from an unfamiliar international number. But what caught his attention was not just the unfamiliar digits, but the country listed beneath them: “Israel.”

“It was terrifying,” Mahmoud tells The Cradle. “The sender greeted me by my full name, praised my media work, then invited me to join their team. I immediately deleted the conversation before they could say more.”

Mahmoud’s case is not unique. Sami, a resident of Sanaa, received a different message with the same pattern. A Facebook account claiming to be a Palestinian doctor invited him to join an “academic discussion” with a Yemeni expert. It included names of well-known Yemenis who supposedly recommended him. Sensing something off, Sami reached out to those named, yet none of them knew anything about the event.

According to corroborated testimonies gathered by The Cradle from journalists and activists across Yemen, these approaches are part of a rapidly expanding campaign of Israeli and American cyber-infiltration and recruitment. 

The covert intel efforts escalated rapidly after 7 October 2023, when Yemen joined the battle in direct military support of Gaza, prompting Tel Aviv and Washington to zero in on Sanaa as a priority intelligence target.

The intelligence vacuum

Yemen’s drone and missile strikes rattled Israeli shipping lanes, and also struck deep inside the occupied state, targeting key military and economic infrastructure, penetrating as far as Ben Gurion Airport. That unanticipated resistance front exposed what Israeli security elites later admitted was a significant intelligence void.

“Israel has many years of familiarity with those enemies [Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas]. There is intelligence and there is the important element of a ground maneuver, and in Yemen we can’t do that. The scale here is different,” Eyal Pinko, a former Israeli defense official and senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – an Israeli think tank – was quoted as saying. 

Until 18 November 2023, neither Mossad nor the military intelligence unit Aman had prioritized penetration and information gathering activities in Yemen. But after sustained attacks from Sanaa, internal Israeli discussions shifted. Calls emerged for “intelligence openness” toward Yemen to narrow the margin of surprise.

The Cradle for more

by WAIYEE LOH

Observers have long hailed Japan’s aptitude for cultural synthesis. Is this characterization warranted, or does it reflect a collective fantasy about exceptionalism?

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War. From 1937 to 1945, the militarist state in Japan battled not only for colonies and resources but also to validate certain key ideas that continue to shape how we talk about Japan’s apparent distinctiveness. One of these ideas was Pan-Asianism: a mode of thinking that saw Japan as uniquely adept at synthesizing diverse peoples and cultures such that both the particular and the universal would co-exist within a single whole. While this form of Japanese exceptionalism manifested itself explicitly in wartime propaganda of the 1930s and 1940s, it goes at least as far back as art historian Okakura Kakuz?’s writings on Japanese aesthetics at the turn of the century and extends forward to the Japanese government’s ongoing Cool Japan campaign. Although the war ended in 1945, the ideologies that animated it remain, in mutated form, with us today.

Japanese imperialism in the years leading up to and during the Asia-Pacific War borrowed heavily from contemporaneous Western forms of imperialism, but it wasn’t simply derivative. After overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the new Meiji government embarked on a program of intensive modernization—which was often synonymous with Westernization—under the slogan of bunmei kaika or “civilization and enlightenment.” Japan’s leaders sought to bring the country in line with the supposedly advanced nation-states of the West, and that meant emulating Western institutions and practices, including extending Japan’s influence over the countries surrounding it.

Japan acquired its first overseas colony, Taiwan, in 1895. It annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910. Like many other industrialized nations, Japan in the 1930s turned to fascism and the construction of autarkic economic empires as a solution to the instabilities engendered by capitalist modernity. Yet there was a major strand in Japanese political thought that set Japanese imperialism in this period apart from earlier European colonialisms and the expansionist activities of Nazi Germany and Italy. Japanese imperialist discourse in the 1930s and early 1940s often portrayed Japanese military aggression as a historic mission to liberate Asia from the European and American imperial powers that had dominated the region for centuries. Japan would then combine all the peoples of Asia into a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, namely, a regional political and economic system where each nation or race would perform a specific role determined by its “natural” cultural attributes.

This pan-Asian ideal was essentially a reaction against the prevailing assumption that being modern required non-Western nations to assimilate into a universal culture based on Western norms and to abandon the cultural traditions that made them unique. Wartime propaganda such as this postcard from Singapore promoted this view by featuring racialized human figures representing different national and ethnic groups gathered around a central Japanese figure (usually in military uniform). Japan, the militarist state insisted, was destined to lead Asia because it could do what no one else could: synthesize discrete elements into a harmonious whole yet maintain the distinctiveness of those elements.

This vision of particularity-in-universality took on its most obvious form during the war, but it had already emerged in earlier forms of pan-Asianism, most notably in Okakura Kakuz?’s English-language writings on Japanese aesthetics. Okakura was born in Yokohama in 1863 to a silk merchant family of samurai origins. He met the Orientalist scholar Ernest Fenollosa when he was a student at the Imperial University of Tokyo and was deeply inspired by the latter’s admiration for Asian art. He later became one of the foremost authorities on Japanese art in the Meiji period. Across his three English-language works—Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906)—Okakura developed a set of ideas that laid the foundation for subsequent narratives about Japan’s apparent genius for cultural hybridization.

In Ideals of the East, Okakura argues that Asian civilization is founded on a shared tradition of spirituality and that Japanese art uniquely reflects this tradition because of Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures without melting them down into an undifferentiated mishmash. Okakura claims that, because the Japanese race is an “Indo-Tartaric” amalgamation, the Japanese people have been especially capable of absorbing Indian and Chinese culture since ancient times. He also asserts that the Japanese race has the special ability to combine the new with the old, the foreign with the indigenous. He uses the metaphor of tidal waves shaping the shore to illustrate his point, writing that “the history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals—the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat against the national consciousness.”

JSTOR Daily for more

by NEIL GIARDINO

Inca Kola outshined Coca-Cola for decades, gaining a foothold during WWII through bodegas owned by a spurned community.

There are few countries in the world where Coca-Cola isn’t the most popular soft drink. But in Peru, that position is held by Inca Kola – an almost 100-year-old beverage deeply embedded in the national identity.

The yellow soda – meant to evoke the grandeur of the ancient Inca Empire and its reverence for gold – was the creation of Joseph Robinson Lindley. The British immigrant had set out from the coal mining town of Doncaster, England, for Peru in 1910 and soon after set up a drinks factory in a working-class district of the capital, Lima.

He started producing small-batch carbonated fruit drinks and gradually expanded. When Inca Kola was created in 1935, with its secret recipe of 13 herbs and aromatics, it was just a year ahead of Coca-Cola’s arrival in the country. Recognising the threat posed by the soft drink giant, which had launched in the US in 1886 and made inroads across Latin America, Lindley invested in the budding television advertising industry to promote Inca Kola.

Advertisement campaigns featuring Inca Kola bottles with their vaguely Indigenous motifs and slogans like “the flavour that unites us” appealed to Peru’s multiethnic society – and to its Inca roots.

It fostered a sense of national pride, explains Andres Macara-Chvili, a marketing professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “Inca Kola was one of the first brands in Peru that connected with a sense of Peruanidad, or what it means to be Peruvian. It spoke to Peruvians about what we are – diverse,” he says.

But it wasn’t only the drink’s appeal to Peruvian identity or its unique flavour (described by some as tasting like bubblegum, by others as being similar to chamomile tea) that enhanced brand awareness. Amid the turmoil of a world war, Inca Kola would also come to prominence for another reason.

Al Jazeera for more

by VIJAY PRASHAD

A study in The Lancet estimates that unilateral sanctions have caused as much death as wars, with an estimated half a million deaths per year.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Those who do not live in war zones or in suffocated countries are forced to live life as if there is nothing strange about what is happening around us. When we read about war, it is disconnected from our lives, and many of us want to stop listening to anything about the human misery caused by weapons or by sanctions. The scholasticism of the academic and the hushed tones of the diplomat are silenced as the bomb and the bank wage war against the planet. After authorising the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima (Japan) on 6 August 1945, US President Harry S. Truman announced on the radio: ‘If [the Japanese] do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth’.

Truman justified the use of that hideous weapon by deceitfully alleging that Hiroshima was a military base. Yet he failed to mention that his bomb – known as ‘Little Boy’ – killed large numbers of civilians. According to the City of Hiroshima, ‘the exact number of deaths from the atomic bombing is still unknown. Estimates place the number of dead by the end of December 1945, when the acute effects of radiation poisoning had largely subsided, at roughly 140,000’. The total population of Hiroshima at that time was 350,000, meaning that 40% of the city’s population died within five months of the blast. A ‘rain of ruin’ had already befallen them.

The Lancet, one of the most distinguished magazines on health and medicine, published an article by Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot with a very scientific title: ‘Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis’. These scholars have studied the impact of sanctions mostly imposed by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations (UN). While these measures are often called ‘international sanctions’, in reality there is nothing international about them. Most sanctions are conducted outside the realm of the UN Charter, chapter five of which insists that such measures can only be taken through a UN Security Council resolution. This is most often not done, and powerful states – mostly the United States and members of the European Union – institute illegal, unilateral sanctions against countries that exceed the logic of human decency.

According to the Global Sanctions Database, the United States, European Union, and UN have sanctioned 25% of the countries in the world. The United States by itself sanctioned 40% of these countries, sanctions that are unilateral because they do not have the assent of a UN Security Council resolution. In the 1960s, only 8% of the world’s countries were under sanctions. This inflation of sanctions demonstrates that it has become normal for the powerful North Atlantic states to wage wars without having to fire a bullet. As US President Woodrow Wilson said in 1919 at the formation of the League of Nations, sanctions are ‘something more tremendous than war’.

The cruellest formulation of Wilson’s statement was made by Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the UN, regarding the US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. A distinguished team of specialists from the Centre for Economic and Social Rights went to Iraq and analysed the data to find that from 1990 to 1996, sanctions had resulted in the ‘excess deaths of over 500,000 children under the age of five. In simple terms, more Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions than the combined toll of two atomic bombs on Japan and the recent scourge of ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia’. On the CBS television programme 60 Minutes, journalist Leslie Stahl asked Albright about this study, saying ‘we have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?’. This was a sincere question. Albright had the opportunity to say many things: she could have said that she had not yet had time to study the report, or she could have shifted the blame to the policies of Saddam Hussein. Instead, she answered, ‘I think that it is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it’.

The Tricontinental Institue for Social Research for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

For someone who has spent nearly a decade in pure-vanilla business journalism, I have a love-hate relationship with financial markets. I love their Byzantine complexity—perhaps the only sector that truly mirrors human life, where simple processes become Rube Goldberg machines of mathematical absurdity. Like in life, the winners are not the straightforward ones following the rules. They are the ones gaming the system, finding loopholes within loopholes, building empires on milliseconds, and exploiting inefficiencies that should not exist in the first place. That is one aspect of the markets that I hate.

Charles Ponzi understood this perfectly. In 1920, he promised investors an unbelievable 50 per cent return in just 45 days. It was a simple scam—he merely paid early investors with money from later ones, creating an illusion of profits. Ponzi’s scheme collapsed spectacularly, branding financial markets forever as playgrounds for the cunning and unscrupulous.

Ponzi famously quipped before his fall, “I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me.” It seems today’s high-frequency traders have transformed that audacious hope into algorithmic certainty, turning Wall Street and global markets into a video game where the house always wins—as long as you own the house, the console, and the fibre-optic cables connecting them.

The core challenge facing modern markets is not just speed—it is the arms race between those who build the systems and those who exploit them. High-frequency trading (HFT) firms now execute over 50 per cent of all US equity trades, operating in timeframes so minute that a sneeze could cost millions. These digital desperados have created a parallel universe where geography matters more to traders today than geology once did to oil barons. Being a millisecond faster than your competitor is now worth more than being right about a company’s fundamentals.

The evolution from ticker tape to today’s algorithmic mayhem reads like a heist movie directed by someone with a PhD in theoretical physics. Consider this: In 1987, during Black Monday, panic engulfed trading floors within a single session, with the Dow plunging 22.6 per cent in less than 7 hours. Today, a flash crash can wipe out a trillion dollars of market value in just 36 minutes—as happened on May 6, 2010—before algorithms even realise they have been spooked by their own shadows.

Michael Lewis captured this absurdity brilliantly in Flash Boys, showing how HFT firms drilled through mountains to lay straighter fibre-optic cables, shaving microseconds off trade execution times. One firm, Spread Networks, spent $300 million to build a cable between Chicago and New Jersey that was 827 miles long—100 miles shorter than the existing route. That difference translated to about, hold your breath, three milliseconds, which industry insiders estimated could mean tens of millions of dollars gained per millisecond saved.

The techniques these firms employ would make Charles Ponzi blush. Take “quote stuffing”—flooding markets with thousands of orders per second, only to cancel them nanoseconds later, creating a smokescreen that slows competitors’ systems. Or “spoofing”, where traders place large orders they never intend to execute, manipulating prices before darting in for the actual trade. It is akin to playing poker while openly showing fake cards to confuse the table.

Reports say Renaissance Technologies, perhaps the most successful quant fund ever, employs more PhDs than many universities—mathematicians, physicists, and signal processing experts who have never taken a finance class but can spot patterns in market noise that traditional traders miss entirely. Their Medallion Fund, after rocky initial years including a 4 per cent loss in 1989, went on to average 66 per cent annual returns before fees, with net returns of 39 per cent after their substantial 5 per cent management and 44 per cent performance fees.

That’s a performance making Warren Buffett seem as cautious as someone hiding cash beneath a mattress.

The infrastructure behind this digital gold rush is equally absurd. Firms pay millions for “co-location” services, placing servers physically inside stock exchanges to eliminate speed-of-light delays. The New York Stock Exchange charges tens of thousands of dollars per month for a single server rack in its Mahwah, New Jersey, facility—more than most Americans earn annually, paid just to be a few feet closer to the matching engine.

Exchanges themselves have become willing accomplices. They sell privileged data feeds granting HFT firms market information microseconds ahead of regular investors. It is like, as an analyst put it, selling binoculars at a horse race, then secretly auctioning telescopes to the highest bidders. The arms race has spawned an entire ecosystem of technological excess. Firms now employ microwave and laser transmissions for faster-than-fibre communication. McKay Brothers operates microwave towers between Chicago and New Jersey that beat fibre by 4.5 microseconds, charging $14,000 monthly for access, effectively monetising time itself.

Frontline for more

LE MONDE

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French historian who has traveled to the Gaza Strip many times over the years, spent a month in the Palestinian territory from December to January. He answered questions from Le Monde’s readers about what he saw there.

Between December 19, 2024, and January 21, 2025, French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, who writes a weekly column on the Middle East in Le Monde, was able to go to the Gaza Strip. The professor at Sciences Po university is publishing his eyewitness account in a book, Un historien à Gaza (“A Historian in Gaza”), set to be released this week in French.

On Monday, May 26, Filiu answered questions from Le Monde‘s readers. Here is a translation of the Q&A originally published in a liveblog in French.

Menton: What event shocked you the most during your time in Gaza?

I was in Gaza from December 19, 2024, to February 21, 2025 – a full month of open hostilities, plus two days of truce. The paradox is that the most violent days were those preceding the truce coming into effect, on January 19. The Israelis intensified the bombings, sometimes very close to where I was staying, while the outside world had been celebrating the announcement of a ceasefire since January 15. The most shocking thing I experienced is the gap between the ordeals experienced in Gaza and the outside world’s perception.

Empathie: How are orphans being cared for in Gaza at the moment? Is there any estimate of their numbers?

The tragedy of Gaza’s orphans is one of the worst disasters unfolding within the broader tragedy of the besieged enclave. The number of orphans is the subject of much debate due to the collapse of the health system and the disappearance of entire families, sometimes with only one surviving child. The society, which I once knew to be so protective within its family structures, has itself collapsed under the weight of widespread slaughter and repeated displacements. Wounded orphans are left abandoned in hospitals with no relatives, not even distant ones, coming to claim them. Bands of street children haunt public dumps, scavenging nylon and wood to resell as fuel.

Vajra: How did you enter the Gaza Strip and how did you leave?

I have been traveling to Gaza for many years, always with the approval of the Israeli authorities as part of what is called a “coordination,” generally granted the evening before for the next morning.

This time, I was integrated into the local team of Doctors Without Borders, which is doing extraordinary work in Gaza and which I assisted thanks to my intimate knowledge of the enclave. I boarded a bus “coordinated” by the United Nations, departing from Amman, the capital of Jordan, along with about 20 other aid workers. Once admitted into Israel in another bus, we were “escorted” by the Israeli military police to Kerem Shalom, the Israeli entry point into the Gaza Strip, where we were then transferred to a UN convoy. We were only allowed to bring personal medication and 3 kilos of food (with no more than 1 kilo per product). I left Gaza following a similar “coordination” and by the reverse route.

H.DO: When there are bombings, we hear about wounded people being taken to the hospital, even though most hospitals are out of service. Can you describe the conditions in which the wounded are treated?

 Le Monde for more

Caution: Extreme violence described

by B. R. GOWANI

Shanti Maheshwari was a 19-year-old girl living in Karachi’s working class neighborhood of Lyari and who got married to Ashok Kumar Mohan on June 16, 2025, after a two-year engagement. But for two days after her wedding, she was brutally, repeatedly, and unnaturally raped by her husband. Shanti was gruesomely wounded, and started to bleed internally.

Her in-laws took Shanti to a health clinic but the doctor released her, and so they brought her home.

On June 30, witnessing Shanti’s seriously deteriorating health, her family brought her back from her in-laws house. Her parents came to know from Shanti that on June 17 and 18, she was a victim of “unnatural sexual acts,” i.e., sodomy.

The assault complaint filed by Shanti’s brother Sayon with police stated that her husband “inserted a metal pipe” and then his “hand and arm” in her anus, and bit her breasts and neck. Her husband threatened Shanti with death if she revealed to anyone what he did to her.

Najma Maheshwari, a social activist from Shanti’s locality, described the violence she was subjected to, to Zofeen Ebrahim of IPS (Inter Press Service):

“Her insides were torn, she was bleeding profusely from her anus and writhing in pain. Hospital visitors urged us to move the gurney outside, complaining the stench was unbearable.

“While cleaning her, medics removed worms from her gut—her injuries were that severe. I’ve seen much in my work, but never such horror or pain,”

(The violence done to Shanti brings to mind similar case in 2012, a gruesome gang rape of a 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi, often known as the “rape capital” of India. Amidst huge protests, she was flown to Singapore for treatment, but could not be saved. As is customary for these type of victims, she was not identified by her own name but by courageous and noble names as: “Nirbhaya,” “Amanat,” “Damini,” and so on.)

Shanti’s relative Sonia, who had arranged Shanti’s marriage, was surprised that despite her bleeding, the doctors released her from Anklesaria hospital where she had been taken.

In South Asia, doctors are usually treated like God by most people. Why didn’t Dr. Rauf, Shanti’s doctor, care for the patient’s failing health? It’s not difficult to guess. The answer lies in three obvious reasons; Shanti was poor, Shanti was a woman, Shanti belonged to a minority — her Hindu name gave away her religion. These three factors must have made the doctor to ignore Shanti’s critical condition. Of course, not wanting to get entangled in a medico-legal case could have been a factor, too, as there was clear evidence of anal trauma caused by sexual violence.

Sayon and Najma took Shanti to the government-run Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Trauma Centre.

Shanti was brought to the trauma center in “comatose” state, and placed on a ventilator. Her continual passing of stool worsened her wounds. The extreme violence inflicted on Shanti was verified by Karachi’s chief police surgeon Dr Summaiya Sayed who concurred that there was clear evidence of anal trauma caused by sexual violence.

Mournfully, Najma remembers, “the last thing she asked for was a sip of water. Then she closed her eyes and never opened them again.” That was on 23 July.

A Pakistani group Aurat March (Women’s March) issued a statement in the wake of Shanti’s painful and tragic death:

“Shanti, a 20-year-old woman, has passed away today after 20 days of being in coma, and after 36 days of being brutally raped by her husband, Ashok Kumar.” “We had earlier posted about this case — about the horrible ordeal that Shanti went through, and the complicity of Ashok’s family, Anklesaria Hospital and Dr. Rauf, that has now resulted in her death.”

In the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan tops the list with 85% of married women undergoing sexual or physical violence by their husbands, compared to India’s 29% and Bangladesh’s 53%.

Globally renowned social activist and classical dancer Sheema Kermani of
Tehrik-e-Niswan (Women’s Movement) Cultural Action Group joined with other women’s groups and civil society in protest. She said possibly Shanti would have survived if the doctor had treated her properly.

In these kinds of horrible cases, celebrities come forward to express shock and show sympathy to the victims and her family or to condole the death. Some are genuine and others do it to enhance their fame. This time, actress singer Ayesha Omar was the only celebrity who mourned Shanti:

“I’m sorry we failed you, Shanti. May justice be served.”

“Praying that this misogynistic society can heal and transform for the better one day.”

The Section 376-B of the Pakistan Penal Code considers rape a crime but it is not very clear on marital rape. Advocate of the High Court Mehwish Muhib Kakakhel points out:

“A dedicated clause was proposed for inclusion in the Anti-Rape Act but was ultimately dropped due to complications around the issue.”

She further noted:

“Marital rape is usually not even considered rape because most people believe it is a woman’s obligation not to say ‘no’ to her husband,” she explained. “This mindset results in most cases going unreported.”

To stop cases of marital rape, Muhib suggested:

“Legal recognition would be a vital step in changing social norms and ensuring accountability.”

However, laws are often made in social vacuum, and remain ineffective and even with strong laws on file protecting women, do not really protect women, because enforcement of these laws remains weak.

Sexual and Reproductive Health education, along with mental health and emotional wellness programs are critical to change the fate of the Shantis of Pakistan.

“Too many young people carry the trauma of childhood sexual abuse,” she said. “As they grow, that buried pain can manifest in troubling ways—some develop sadistic or masochistic behaviors, especially when exposed to unchecked pornography. It doesn’t heal them; it deepens the harm.”

To fill this gap, she and a group of like-minded doctors at the Association for Mothers and Newborns (AMAN)*—the implementation arm of Pakistan’s National Committee for Maternal and Neonatal Health—developed Bakhabar Noujawan (Informed Youth), an online SRH program endorsed by the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination, launched in 2023.

“We’re trying to introduce it in colleges, but convincing faculty is an uphill battle—they first need to grasp the course’s importance,” she said.
Covering over two dozen culturally sensitive topics—from premarital counselling, child and cousin marriage, domestic violence, STIs, to teenage pregnancy—the programme doesn’t shy away from tough conversations. “We’re now developing a module on marital rape,” says Ahsan, head of AMAN. “The first draft is nearly complete.”

Alongside SRH education, Sayed emphasized the need for mental health and emotional wellness programs.

“Too many young people carry the trauma of childhood sexual abuse,” she said. “As they grow, that buried pain can manifest in troubling ways—some develop sadistic or masochistic behaviors, especially when exposed to unchecked pornography. It doesn’t heal them; it deepens the harm.”

IPSNews

Why did Ashok Kumar committed such heinous acts? Only a thorough psychological evaluation could throw some light on this terrible act. Delving into his motivations and intentions, could present a case history, when communicated to a wider audience, may prevent this somewhat in the future. Everyone knows, no such thing is going to happen, sadly.

Shanti

shanti, a word of Sanskrit origin, means silence, peace, …
Shanti wasn’t at peace; her anatomy was torn due to sexual violence
Shanti didn’t remain silent; she told her personal trauma to her parents
Shanti’s milieu was poor; so the doctor’s conscience remained silent
Shanti’s gender was female; so the patriarchy remained at peace
Shanti, a teenager, was forced to lethal silence and finally … achieved shanti… deadly peace…

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

by JASIM AL-AZZAWI

It is yet another sign of a looming ‘tech cold war’.

For the past few years, governments across the world have paid close attention to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There, it is said, we see the first glimpses of what warfare of the future will look like, not just in terms of weaponry, but also in terms of new technologies and tactics.

Most recently, the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran demonstrated not just new strategies of drone deployment and infiltration but also new vulnerabilities. During the 12-day conflict, Iran and vessels in the waters of the Gulf experienced repeated disruptions of GPS signal.

This clearly worried the Iranian authorities who, after the end of the war, began to look for alternatives.

“At times, disruptions are created on this [GPS] system by internal systems, and this very issue has pushed us toward alternative options like BeiDou,” Ehsan Chitsaz, deputy communications minister, told Iranian media in mid-July. He added that the government was developing a plan to switch transportation, agriculture and the internet from GPS to BeiDou.

Iran’s decision to explore adopting China’s navigation satellite system may appear at first glance to be merely a tactical manoeuvre. Yet, its implications are far more profound. This move is yet another indication of a major global realignment.

For decades, the West, and the US in particular, have dominated the world’s technological infrastructure from computer operating systems and the internet to telecommunications and satellite networks.

This has left much of the world dependent on an infrastructure it cannot match or challenge. This dependency can easily become vulnerability. Since 2013, whistleblowers and media investigations have revealed how various Western technologies and schemes have enabled illicit surveillance and data gathering on a global scale – something that has worried governments around the world.

Al Jazeera for more