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Casualty Of Punjab BJP's Kewal Singh Dhillion Move: Internal Cohesion
Kewal Singh Dhillion became the chief of BJP's Punjab unit last month.
"COHESION" · 총 29건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 88,598건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.3(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,465건(5.0%)·중립 82,034건(92.6%)·부정 2,099건(2.4%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 15.0(중도 균형)입니다.
Kewal Singh Dhillion became the chief of BJP's Punjab unit last month.
Singapore has ordered YouTube, Facebook, and X to block 14 posts targeting its Indian community and multiculturalism. The Ministry of Home Affairs stated the content, originating from overseas and likely China, aimed to sow discord by attacking the nation's multiracial society. These actions underscore Singapore's commitment to social cohesion and opposition to xenophobia.
The Minister for Digital Development and Information was commenting on the problematic narratives found in several blocked posts and urged people not to share them.
The Minister for Digital Development and Information was commenting on the problematic narratives found in several social media posts and urged people not to share them.
Professor Peter Atwater believes economic inequality has mutated into something more dangerous for social cohesion. ‘Such an unequal economy is fragile, like a Jenga tower,’ he warns
Football: a force for social cohesion and unity among peoples. But to fully experience that passion and those emotions, World Cup fans making the trip should expect a hefty bill. Airfare prices are skyrocketing during the tournament. Stadium seats can cost up to 5,000 euros and getting there from your hotel will cost astronomical sums as well.
Spaniard Roberto Losada has officially been appointed as the new head coach of the SAR football team, the Football Association of Hong Kong, China (HKFA) announced on Friday. The 49-year-old took charge of the SAR squad as interim boss in December, following the departure of former head coach Ashley Westwood. Over the past six months, Losada led the team through their final AFC Asian Cup qualifying match against India, as well as the annual Guangdong-Hong Kong Cup. Losada's official appointment comes as the SAR squad take on Mongolia in a friendly at Hong Kong Stadium on Friday. HKFA’s chairman Eric Fok said the association had high hopes for Losada. “We hope the new head coach will bring a clear direction to the team, including establishing a clear style of play, strengthening tactical organisation and improving in-game stability and discipline. We also hope that under the coach's guidance, team cohesion will be strengthened and our players will achieve a higher level of performance,” he said. Losada, who has lived in Hong Kong for 16 years and won three Coach of the Year awards while managing local Premier League club Eastern, said he would give more chances to local young players. “We are going to try to make our squad a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more young. We are not going to have too many naturalised players in the coming three, four years coming in for the squad, so we have to start to trust our young boys,” he said. “Our players that have been working hard to get into the squad, and they deserve the chance. We're going to do it a little bit steady and smooth, try to put some young boys coming up, integrate them in the team with the seniors that we have, and try in a couple of years to have a very competitive squad." A former professional player himself, Losada scored 27 goals in 113 appearances in Spain’s La Liga and won a Hong Kong Footballer of the Year award while playing with local Premier League club Kitchee. Meanwhile, the HKFA also announced that Hong Kong is set to host Division 2 of the inaugural Fifa Asean Cup across the months of September and October. The new tournament features a two-tier format, with Indonesia hosting the top-flight Division 1, and Hong Kong staging the second division, which will see six participating teams. Fok pointed out that the event would be the first time Hong Kong hosted a Fifa-sanctioned international football tournament, saying this is of great significance to football development in the SAR. “They are not just ordinary international friendly matches as the teams will need to compete continuously in a short period of time, facing different opponents under pressure and goals to achieve,” he said. Fok added that since the event is scheduled during the Fifa International Match Calendar, he believes the participating teams would send more complete lineups, further raising the level of competition. Edited by Tony Sabine
The INDIA bloc is facing renewed questions over its unity after the DMK decided to withdraw from a key opposition meeting, citing “betrayal” by the Congress following the Tamil Nadu elections.This development comes amid reported internal tensions within other alliance partners as well, including the Trinamool Congress (TMC), further intensifying concerns about cohesion within the opposition front.Political analysts suggest that these growing rifts could reshape national politics and potentially give the NDA an advantage in upcoming parliamentary and legislative battles. n18oc_politicsn18oc_plain-speakn18oc_indiaNews18 Mobile App - https://onelink.to/desc-youtube
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei said on Thursday that his country’s adversaries had turned to “hybrid warfare”, aimed at creating divisions among Iranians, after receiving a “decisive blow”. Mojtaba, who has not appeared publicly since being named as the supreme leader on March 8, made these remarks in his message on the death anniversary of Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The message shared on his official X account and reported by the Iranian media. Mojtaba’s message stated, “The malicious enemy has been defeated in its confrontation with the armed forces. Since it has received a decisive blow both in military combat and in Iran’s public squares and streets, it’s experiencing a profound and significant humiliation. “The enemy has focused its schemes in hybrid warfare on two points: the resilience of the Iranian people and trying to create errors in the assessments of the country’s officials. The instrument it’s using for both is sowing the seeds of doubt, despair, fear, mistrust and discord.” “In confronting these ill intentions, everyone must, through steadfastness, insight, preserving unity and cohesion … neutralise their sinister plot,” his message said. He further said, “Imperialism, led by the US, has built a military base called Israel over the past 80 years. And they don’t accept the existence of a strong, independent Iran on the eastern border of the false, illegitimate geography of ‘Greater Israel’ — that is, east of the Euphrates River.” Mojtaba also highlighted the role of Iranian authorities in this regard, saying that “any act that causes pessimism and disappointment among the people is considered a kind of aid to the enemy of this country and its people”, Press TV reported. The remarks by Iran’s third supreme leader were read out by a prayer leader at the mausoleum of Khomeini, on the 37th anniversary of his death. After Khomeini’s death in 1989, Ali Khamenei succeeded him as supreme leader until he was assassinated on February 28 this year during US and Israeli attacks that triggered a regional war. The conflict was halted with a ceasefire deal on April 8, followed by direct and mediated talks for a permanent end that have failed to reach an agreement. Every June 4 since 1989, Ali Khamenei had delivered a speech at the commemoration. This year, an empty chair bearing his portrait stood at the mausoleum, according to footage broadcast from the site. Portraits of Mojtaba and the two previous supreme leaders were displayed at the mausoleum in southern Tehran, according to the live broadcast. Attendees waved the flag of the Islamic republic and banners of the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
According to him, conversations that should have focused on development and the future of the country were diverted into divisive debates that weakened national cohesion. The post Obi defends Pastor Adeboye, warns Nigerians against ethnic division appeared first on Vanguard News.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias “I am in blood, Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” — William Shakespeare, Macbeth PROLOGUE This is and isn’t about America’s illegal war against Iran. It is primarily about hiding an empire in plain sight and now watching it unravel in plain sight. The war against Iran becomes a consequential event in tandem with other structural weaknesses, a fillip of sorts. It reminds one of the Soviet war on Afghanistan. That war, in and of itself, did not bring down the Soviet Leviathan. The process inhered in the very make-up of the Soviet Union. The war just shoved it over the precipice. But let’s get on with our purpose here. In August 2022, then-US President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. A $280 billion legislative package, it sought to revitalise domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The act was a response to a startling vulnerability: the world’s most advanced chips, essential for everything from F-35 fighter jets to surgical equipment to artificial intelligence, are overwhelmingly manufactured by a single company, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), located on an island claimed as sovereign territory by America’s primary strategic rival, China. This dependence is not an accident of geography or a supply chain anomaly. The semiconductor industry wasn’t even hobbled by Covid 19. Despite its complex and far-flung operations, the industry works smoothly. The US dependence is the logical endpoint of a decades-long corporate strategy that maximised profit by outsourcing physical production while retaining only the high-value design and marketing ends of the value chain, the so-called “Smile Curve” strategy. The undoing of the United States in the Iran war may be far more significant than its defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It may well mark a historic milestone in the fraying of the position of the US as a global hegemon. But the seeds of this erosion of American dominance, argues Ejaz Haider, were laid long before its misadventure in Iran… The Italian economist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, to whom I shall return, would have been amused to see the revered smile curve — taught at prestigious business schools and which encourages firms to outsource capital-intensive manufacturing to focus solely on high-margin research and development (R&D), branding and marketing — as a classic trap of late-stage capitalism. In fact, the CHIPS Act stands as a state-level admission that this strategy, so profitable for individual corporations like Apple and NVIDIA, to name just two, has become a major geopolitical vulnerability for the US. This is the central paradox of America’s declining empire. The very mechanisms that generated unprecedented wealth have systemically dismantled the material and industrial foundations upon which that wealth ultimately rests. The decline of the American empire is not a partisan talking point. The US is a behemoth. It won’t just collapse one day like the Berlin Wall. Nor is a snapshot view the way to go. It is an ongoing structural process and a number of scholars have used longitudinal designs to analyse the trend lines. I argue that it is a slow, systemic unravelling across interconnected domains. First, the financialisation of capital, theorised most rigorously by Arrighi. Capital shifts from productive investment to speculative finance, generating short-term profits at the cost of long-term industrial vitality. It hollows out domestic industrial and political power, a process identified by American sociologist and political scientist Ho-fung Hung, who argues that off-shoring of production destroys the industrial ecosystem, skilled labour base and, ultimately, the social cohesion required for great power competition. Second, the erosion of the alliance system. And no, it’s not just Trump. Three deeper currents are involved: the gradual unravelling of the post-WWII security architecture; the economic failure of neoliberalism; and the imperial outreach baked into the very idea of neoliberalism. Third, the lateral diffusion of technologies, now commodified and everywhere. They help innovative and determined weaker powers offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers: Ukraine versus Russia; Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis versus the US-Zionist duo; and now Iran versus the US-Zionist duo. As I note later in this space, the war against Iran is a much bigger setback for the US than its wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Corollary: the post-WWII ‘Pax Americana’ is transitioning from a period of hegemonic stability, to use American historian Charles Kindleberger’s concept, into a protracted and likely irreversible, terminal crisis, to borrow Arrighi’s term. But let’s first begin with the peg: the war against Iran. THE PRESENT Since its inception, America has been at war: wars of choice, wars of conquest, wars for resources, wars to defend its hegemony, wars to spread “American values.” How or why does the Iran war stand out? Foremost, the conflict has confirmed the structural limits of US coercive diplomacy in a shifting multipolar world. It has exposed acute structural vulnerabilities in defence economics and inventory endurance, as well as a critical absence of pragmatic post-war planning and a misreading of societal resilience. The conflict has also underscored the changing nature of global alignments in a multipolar world. This comes with the collapse of coercive economic power. For four decades, the US has relied on sophisticated sanctions and lawfare to pressure Iran into subjugation. It has failed, showing the limits of sanctions, especially on fungible commodities. Even sanctions on non-fungible elements like technology can be circumvented. As in Iran’s case, the sanctioned state can develop indigenous expertise through varied strategies. There’s clear evidence that Tehran has developed complex and sophisticated non-dollar lifelines with China and Russia, rendering unilateral sanctions increasingly ineffective. It has used an array of strategies to blunt the effect: interchangeability (can’t sell to X; sell to Y); value retention (barter, use of cryptocurrencies); substitution and evasion (relying on third parties, covert ship-to-ship transfers, use of shell companies). Unlike the insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is not involved in ground combat in Iran (so far). It has relied on high-tech aerial and missile attacks through its formidable ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) capabilities. Iran has not responded through elusive, hit-and-run ground attacks. It has countered US technology through technology in a non-contact war. But its employment of technology is grounded in asymmetric capabilities: a large arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. The cost-exchange ratio, by most accounts, is unfavourable for the US. For instance, the Iranian Shahed-136 one-way attack drone has an estimated unit cost of $20,000 (some estimates put it at around $10,000). It is a simple, slow-moving, and relatively easy to detect drone. But it is also cheap and plentiful. To intercept it with costly SM-2 or ESSM missiles creates a cost-exchange ratio of between 30 to one and 100 to one. It is also a shoot-and-scoot system. Iran can afford to lose hundreds of such drones and produce some 1,000 per month. The US cannot afford to fire thousands of interceptors at them. And those interceptors take three to four years to manufacture. It is a cost-asymmetric war. Similarly, the US has been pulling out assets from the Pacific to the Gulf. The USS Boxer amphibious group is an example. Diverting naval assets from the Pacific physically manifests deployment overstretch. As Robert Farley, visiting professor at US Army War College notes, resources needed to prevail in one theatre guarantee weakness in another. It’s the same with all force deployments and employments: “Every missile allocated to one target is unavailable for another.” The contrast with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is instructive. In those theatres, the US was defeated by determined insurgencies, even as it bombed and bombed. The adversaries were willing to absorb enormous casualties, drag it out and inflict mission fatigue on the US. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, broadly speaking, the US won the conventional war expeditiously but then got bogged down. In the Iran conflict, while Tehran has demonstrated the ability to absorb much pain, the US is not facing elusive insurgents but a state with a sophisticated missile programme, a sharp understanding of force employment, a network of allies across the region (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq and Syria), and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Iran has also demonstrated adaptation under fire, used the operational strategy of dispersal and delegation, exercised deception, demonstrated growing targeting capabilities through ISR, rapid repair of underground sites after US-Zionist bombing and consistently shifted locations for counterattack operations. Can the US still bomb Iran? Of course. Will that be painful? Yes. Will Iran respond? Hell, yes. Would that raise the overall cost? You can bet your dime on it. It will be proof, yet again, that it is a slow grind and the US cannot achieve its objectives at a sustainable cost. Yet, it is stuck, because to walk away means it loses credibility. Trump needs a win; Iran is not prepared to give him that. The war has changed the ground realities. There is no status quo ante. The objectives remain strategically incompatible — ie we might get a pause, even a long one, but the essential causes remain unaddressed. Spoiler alert: Zionist entity. US President Donald Trump attending the return of the bodies of the first six American soldiers killed during the war with Iran on March 7, 2026: the lateral diffusion of technologies help innovative and determined weaker powers, such as Iran, offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers, such as the US | AFP THE POINTILLIST EMPIRE: HOW IT BEGAN American imperialism did not begin with grand pronouncements like the Monroe Doctrine or the Big Stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt, though they give us a potent sense of a rising, expansionist power. It literally began with bird poop, which sounds about right if one were to understand imperialism as a crap enterprise. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 allowed US citizens to claim uninhabited, guano-rich islands. The act set a precedent for later overseas acquisitions. Historian Daniel Immerwahr calls this a “pointillist” empire. This practical, resource-driven, and often hidden expansion set a pattern that would define America’s power and military bases for the next century. The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) established the continental empire, seizing vast territories from Mexico. This wasn’t a war of liberation but a war of conquest, not manifest destiny but a fig leaf to cover the musty crotch of violent expansion, economic greed and racial supremacy. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formalised the seizure of over half of Mexico’s territory. The Spanish-American War of 1898 definitively projected American power overseas. Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay, in a personal letter to Roosevelt, called it a “splendid little war.” By its end, the US had seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. But the “splendid” label concealed a brutal reality, just like the payload of Trump’s “gorgeous B-2 bombers.” The subsequent Philippine-American War (1899-1902) resulted in Filipino genocide. That savagery has been systematically erased from American popular memory, even as Mark Twain was scathing in his condemnation and also did a fantastic job of calling out Rudyard Kipling for The White Man’s Burden. But this wasn’t all. Immerwahr documents that American forces employed waterboarding (yes, much before the darned ‘War on Terror’), concentration camps (“black sites”), and scorched-earth tactics that would be recognisable to any student of colonial atrocities. After World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted a new form of imperialism: liberal internationalism, rather than direct territorial control. Much has been written about the “Wilsonian moment.” British historian and diplomat E. H. Carr called it a utopian project, divorced from the reality of power politics. In fact, it wasn’t. The project was essentially colonial and Wilson’s liberal internationalism fit it perfectly. The mandates were thriving. The US Senate’s refusal to join the League of Nations left a vacuum that no amount of idealistic pronouncements could fill. War did come. Carr gives us insights into why it became inevitable. The US emerged from the war as the leading power. The post-WWII order was a direct lesson learned from the intervening two decades. No more “isolationism”. The US must play the role of the hegemonic stabiliser. The core argument was simple and powerful: a stable world economy requires a single power to act as lender of last resort, maintain an open market for distressed goods, and coordinate macroeconomic policies. The US did that via the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan and a vast security architecture that spanned the globe. The quid for the quo? American dominance. The US was now fully involved. It bore the cost but the return on investment was handsome. It kept the US in the lead, even during the bipolarity of the Cold War and beyond. With the Berlin wall crumbling, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama became the mascot for neoliberalism. History had ended; all the wagon trains were destined for one town. Some might arrive late, but arrive they would. Europe was pacified and rebuilt. Japan was demilitarised and transformed into a manufacturing powerhouse. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency, giving the US what French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing called “exorbitant privilege.” For three decades, from 1945 to the early 1970s, this system appeared to confirm the virtues of hegemonic stability. Real GDP growth in Western Europe averaged nearly five percent annually, and the US share of world manufacturing output remained above 40 percent. But beneath the surface, the seeds of decline were already being sown. ARRIGHIAN COUNTER World-systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi were not focused on immediate “imperial overstretch” in the manner of British historian Paul Kennedy. Kennedy argued that empires declined when their military commitments outpaced their economic base. The US, he warned, was suffering from imperial overreach. For Arrighi, the decline was gradual and subtle. He argued that capitalist hegemonies move through repeating “systemic cycles of accumulation.” A phase of material expansion where capital is invested in production, infrastructure and trade, inevitably gives way to a phase of financial expansion, where capital seeks profit through speculation, lending and financial engineering. The material foundation is hollowed out even as the financial superstructure appears to boom. This was the logic of capitalism. The “autumn” of each hegemon is marked by a dazzling financial belle époque that masks terminal decline. The smile curve strategy is the purest expression of this financialisation and Apple is a textbook case. It designs its products, develops its chips, creates the operating systems, controls the branding, marketing and the retail experience. But it manufactures almost nothing. The iPhones and MacBooks are assembled by Foxconn in Zhengzhou and by Pegatron in Shanghai. The advanced chips are fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan. The displays come from Samsung in South Korea and LG Display. Apple captures an estimated 80-90 percent of the profit from each device, while the suppliers who do the actual physical work fight over the remaining scraps. Business schools love this strategy because it maximises corporate profits and shareholder value. But as Hung argues in his work on global value chains and the Arrighian counter, what maximises corporate profits does not necessarily maximise national power. In fact, it may systematically undermine it. By outsourcing the middle of the smile curve, the US has drastically hollowed out its industrial ecosystem. Combine it with the faith in short, sharp wars of shock and awe through high-tech precision weapons and we get the full picture of what has happened in the war against Iran. This is very different from the WWII industrial base of America. This brings us to TSMC and the chokepoint crisis. It manufactures chips designed by other companies (Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm) rather than designing and selling its own chips. Over three decades, TSMC has built an unassailable lead in advanced process nodes. By 2025, it was manufacturing 92 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. The entire global technology industry (including the US military and intelligence apparatus) became dependent on a single cluster of fabs (fabrication plants) in Hsinchu, Taichung and Tainan. China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland by force if necessary, has the physical means to blockade or invade the island. Whether it would do so or should is a different debate. On ground, the People’s Liberation Army has been systematically building anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, to prevent US intervention in a Taiwan scenario. It’s a fairly absurd position from the US point of view! Its technological supremacy is guaranteed by a factory complex on an island which, in theory, its primary strategic rival could potentially seize or blockade. To circle back to the CHIPS Act, this is the background. TSMC is now building a fab complex in Arizona. Intel is expanding in Ohio and Arizona. Samsung is building in Texas. But, as a 2023 Marketplace report noted, replicating TSMC’s “deep, deep process knowledge” will take years. The fab in Arizona has already faced delays, cost overruns, and labour disputes. Taiwanese engineers are reluctant to relocate to the United States. The set goes to Arrighi. America’s weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives | Shutterstock THE DOLLAR DILEMMA The dollar’s role as the world’s primary reserve currency has been a central pillar of American power since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. This exorbitant privilege allows the US to borrow in its own currency, run persistent trade deficits without penalty and, crucially, impose unilateral financial sanctions on states, corporations, and individuals. This weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives. China has been aggressively promoting its own Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) as an alternative to Swift. The People’s Bank of China has signed bilateral currency swap agreements with dozens of countries, allowing trade to be settled in renminbi rather than dollars. Russia has demanded payment in rubles for its natural gas exports. India has established a rupee settlement mechanism for trade. Brazil and China have agreed to trade in their own currencies. The Central Bank of Brazil has announced that it is diversifying its reserves away from the dollar. And yet, the actual pace of de-dollarisation has been glacial. Several structural factors explain this “stickiness”, to use American political economist Benjamin Cohen’s term. First, there is network stickiness. The dollar’s dominance is not simply a matter of policy; it is an issue of deep, self-reinforcing infrastructure. Global supply chains, commodity exchanges, derivatives markets, and correspondent banking networks are all built around the dollar. Second, as various experts have argued, there is a lack of viable alternatives. The Chinese renminbi, despite China’s enormous economic weight, is not a free-floating, fully convertible currency. China maintains capital controls, a heavily regulated financial system, and a non-independent central bank. No foreign investor can be certain that their renminbi holdings would not be frozen or devalued by arbitrary state action. The euro, the second-largest reserve currency, is hobbled by the Eurozone’s fragmented fiscal system and the lingering scars of the 2011 debt crisis. Gold is impractical for everyday transactions. And cryptocurrencies are far too volatile and illiquid to serve as a reserve asset. Third is the absence of a deep, liquid and open bond market. A reserve currency requires a “safe asset” in which foreign central banks can park their surplus reserves. The US Treasury market, with $25 trillion in outstanding debt and extraordinary liquidity, is the only game in town. Result: while China and Russia publicly call for de-dollarisation, their central banks have themselves continued to accumulate US Treasury securities, because there is nowhere else to go. Corollary: the near-term prognosis for de-dollarisation is not collapse but slow erosion. IMF data shows the dollar’s share of global reserves has declined from over 70 percent in 2000 to approximately 58 percent in 2025. This is not a precipitous decline, but it is a steady one. The debate is not if the dollar will lose its dominance but when. I have no expertise in this area and I have relied on studying existing expertise. Most analyses measure the timeframe in decades, not years. From that, my understanding is that increasing uncertainty, further weaponisation of the dollar, continuing application of sanctions and asset freezes will (a) erode the confidence that underpins the entire system and (b) force experts (and governments) to find alternatives. EPILOGUE: TERMINAL CRISIS Two other issues are important but I am only flagging them here for paucity of space: the implosion of neoliberalism and its internal effects and the fraying of the transatlantic alliance. Both are exacerbated by Trump but neither is a direct result of his election. Both are extremely consequential. The United States has not collapsed; not yet. Nor can it be defeated from outside. But it can crumble from within. The future is not about a return to US hegemony, certainly not in a unipolar sense. The industrial base may be gone but it can be rebuilt, albeit not overnight. Alliances are frayed; trust cannot be easily restored. The fiscal position is precarious, with a $35 trillion US national debt. Internal politics is deeply polarised, with a significant portion of the American electorate believing that the system is rigged against them. A lot of these factors, singly and in combination with other factors, are self-reinforcing. The future also lies in terra incognita, a contested transition to a multipolar world, whose contours remain unknown. A recent book by German political analyst Marc Saxer, Geopolitical Conflict in the Wolf World, is a sobering structural assessment of where the world and the US are headed. “Homo homini lupus est” (Man is a wolf to man) is how Saxer begins. With that statement, we are back to Plautus and Hobbes. This is not mere rhetorical flourish. Saxer’s wolf world is an analytic category, a systemic condition characterised by the absence of a hegemon capable of enforcing rules, the demise of neoliberalism, the collapse of shared legal-normative frameworks, the return of great-power competition, the rise of Middle Powers, many with regional hegemonic aspirations, and the normalisation of coercion as a primary instrument of statecraft. As I said to Saxer during the launch of his book in Lahore, for the Global South, it has always been a wolf world. Pax Americana did not keep the peace for the periphery. It financed selective peace on credit. The bill has now come due. The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider Published in Dawn, EOS, May 31st, 2026
A one-day sensory-driven tour of China's richest county-level city didn't just delight the palates of seven international visitors — it opened their eyes to how an economy can march with efficiency, timing, and cohesion.
Countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda Source: International Organization for Migration Please refer to the attached file. The Ituri Solutions and Mobility Index (April 2026) finds that overall conditions in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are moderately stable but fragile. Most communities report feeling safe (82%) and unlikely to move in the near future (95%), with rising optimism compared to six months earlier. The composite stability index is 0.65 out of 1, indicating a generally favourable situation. However, Mahagi and Aru show relatively higher stability, while Tchomia lags significantly, particularly in living standards and livelihoods. Meanwhile, about one in five villages shows signs of deterioration, especially in access to public services and security, highlighting underlying vulnerabilities. The assessment shows that security and social cohesion are relatively strong, despite persistent issues such as theft and localized armed-group presence. In contrast, standards of living are the weakest area, marked by very limited electricity access (93% of villages lack it), poor water availability, and weak infrastructure, while livelihood opportunities remain constrained by limited land registration, weak services, and low connectivity. These structural gaps are particularly concerning in the context of a new Ebola outbreak declared in May 2026, as only a small share of villages have fully functional health services. Overall, while displacement risk remains low in the short term, chronic service gaps, inequality across zones, and health-system weaknesses continue to threaten long-term stability.
Under the proposed changes, Wamboka will join the Committee on National Cohesion and Equal Opportunity, replacing Luanda MP Dick Maungu Oyugi, who has been transferred to the PIC on Governance and Education as a substantive member.
Country: Kenya Source: REACH Initiative Please refer to the attached file. 2. Rationale 2.1 Background The arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) of northern Kenya, particularly the counties of Marsabit, Mandera, Wajir, Turkana, and Garissa, continue to experience multidimensional humanitarian needs driven by the intersection of climatic shocks, chronic vulnerability, and socio-economic marginalization. Over recent years, these counties have experienced climate variabilities that have severely disrupted livelihoods, reduced livestock productivity, damaged infrastructure, displaced households, and weakened already fragile coping capacities.1 While drought conditions have historically shaped humanitarian response planning in the ASAL regions, the increasing overlap between drought recovery periods and recurrent flooding events has created more multidimensional vulnerabilities affecting various populations. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, food insecurity remains a defining feature of vulnerability across ASAL counties. As of 2025, approximately 3.3 million people in Kenya were classified in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) or worse, with around 400,000 in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency).2 REACH Initiative revealed widespread needs across key sectors, including water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), health, nutrition, shelter, and protection.3 In this context, the humanitarian situation in northern Kenya has become increasingly dynamic due to the overlapping impacts of drought and flooding. While early 2026 was characterized by worsening drought conditions across several ASAL counties, the onset of the March–May 2026 long rains led to flooding that reportedly affected tens of thousands of households, disrupting livelihoods, damaging infrastructure, contaminating water sources, and increasing displacement risks in multiple locations.4 However, rainfall distribution has remained uneven and erratic across the targeted counties. Mandera and Wajir counties continue to experience severe conditions and remain in the alarm phase, while Garissa, Marsabit, and Turkana are classified in the alert phase.5 This variability has created a complex humanitarian environment in which some communities are attempting to recover from prolonged drought while simultaneously facing emerging flood-related impacts. The refugee-hosting areas, such as Dadaab refugee camp in Garissa County, Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in Turkana County, where humanitarian conditions continue to evolve amid funding constraints and policy transitions. Recent reductions in humanitarian assistance, including food ration cuts and differentiated assistance approaches based on household vulnerability status, are likely to have significant implications for food consumption, indebtedness, coping strategies, social cohesion, and overall household well-being. In addition, accountability to affected populations (AAP) and equitable access to humanitarian assistance remain key operational concerns across the target counties.6 During the design phase, REACH consulted with a range of humanitarian and government stakeholders to contextualize the assessment and avoid duplicating existing data collection efforts. This involved discussions through the NGO Refugee Group (NRG), OCHA-led sector coordination meetings, engagements with sector focal points, the NDMA, and relevant county government counterparts. The input gathered through these consultations helped shape indicator selection, geographic prioritization, and alignment with ongoing humanitarian analysis and planning. Against this backdrop, the MSNA seeks to generate comprehensive household-level evidence on the severity, distribution, and drivers of humanitarian needs across food security, nutrition, health, WASH, livelihoods, shelter, education, and protection sectors in Mandera, Wajir, Marsabit, Turkana, and Garissa counties, including refugee camps and settlements. The assessment will support humanitarian actors, county governments, and development partners in identifying sectoral and geographic disparities, understanding differences between refugee and host community populations, and informing evidence-based targeting, resource allocation, and multisectoral response planning within Kenya’s evolving humanitarian landscape.
Germany and the Netherlands will set up a joint tactical headquarters in the Baltics this year to command forces on Nato’s eastern flank and help deter Russia, Berlin said on Thursday. The joint German-Dutch command centre known as 1GNC will “assume a command role on Nato’s eastern flank, specifically in the region of Estonia and Latvia” in coming months, the German defence ministry said in a statement. “The deployment of an additional tactical headquarters to the region strengthens the cohesion...
Countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda Source: International Peace Institute On May 15, 2026, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) confirmed its seventeenth recorded outbreak of Ebola, in Ituri province. Since then, the number of cases has risen to over 900 and the virus has crossed into Uganda and reached the provinces of North and South Kivu, now controlled by the Rwanda-backed M23. Initial reports suggesting that the outbreak may have been circulating for weeks and local health authorities were underprepared to swiftly mount a containment strategy. As Ebola Returns to Eastern DRC, International Responders Must Not Repeat the Mistakes of 2018 May 26, 2026by Dirk Druet Ebola task force of MONUSCO and UNICEF Focal point Felicien Malyra (with information pamphlet), inform prisoners at the jail “Kakwangura" in Butembo in North Kivu about how they may protect themselves against the Ebola Virus on August 9, 2019. UN Photo/Martine Perret. On May 15, 2026, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) confirmed its seventeenth recorded outbreak of Ebola, in Ituri province. Since then, the number of cases has risen to over 900 and the virus has crossed into Uganda and reached the provinces of North and South Kivu, now controlled by the Rwanda-backed M23. Initial reports suggesting that the outbreak may have been circulating for weeks and local health authorities were underprepared to swiftly mount a containment strategy. As international concern grows that the deadly virus might be out of control, the mounting public health response is facing an even more challenging environment than during the last major outbreak in 2018. No vaccine exists for this strain of the virus and Goma, the logistical hub of eastern DRC, is occupied by an armed group. The UN peacekeeping operation in the DRC (MONUSCO) has been drawing down its operations and is now confined to Ituri and North Kivu. On top of this, the global health architecture is under strain following the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) earlier this year and a growing deficit in funding to address health emergencies. In this challenging and high-risk context, it is critical that the lessons of the last outbreak inform the management of this one. The temptation in a fast-moving outbreak is to treat the response as an urgent technical problem requiring an urgent technical solution: identify cases, trace contacts, isolate the infected, vaccinate where possible, and bury the deceased safely. But as many learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency health responses in complex political situations are not neutral interventions in passive contexts; they are political acts. This is particularly true in conflict environments, where large-scale public health responses distribute resources at scale, legitimize or delegitimize particular actors, reshape local security arrangements, and engage with populations that read them through the lens of the conflict. When the Health Response Became Part of the Conflict in the DRC In eastern DRC, the 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak was described by WHO as a “perfect storm” in which a highly infectious disease was spreading in an area of active conflict. The Congolese public, particularly in the country’s east, widely viewed their government as predatory, and much of the affected population resided in crowded conditions with poor health infrastructure and was located near porous international borders. Given the seriousness of the risks to local and international public health, WHO and partners in the international community launched a massive health and humanitarian response. This operation was grounded in the principle of “no regrets,” which holds that it is better to overreact to a public health emergency and adjust later rather than act too late. This approach was broadly seen as empowering WHO to take direct action in the affected area with only limited consultation with other parts of the UN system. Many of the decisions made during this period had devastating side effects: they empowered officials and security forces notorious for reprisals against local communities and produced what became known as the “Ebola Business”—a war economy with actors invested in prolonging the crisis. This conflation of the Ebola response with the conflict led to community resistance and violence against health workers that inhibited containment and accelerated transmission. By the time the outbreak was declared over in 2020, more than 3,400 people had been infected, of which some 2,200 had died. Moreover, the conflict in eastern DRC had become even more entrenched, with the ADF armed group carrying out sustained atrocities in Beni territory in North Kivu. MONUSCO’s authority was openly contested by host populations, culminating in the torching of its office in Boikene, near the town of Beni, in 2019. The risks to Congolese lives and international public health posed by the latest outbreak merit a large, swift health and humanitarian response. Such a response is all the more urgent following recent cuts to international support to the Congolese national health system, particularly as a result of the dismantling of USAID, which have reduced the country’s epidemic preparedness and likely undermined its capacity for early detection. However, a response that is not grounded in an understanding of conflict dynamics is likely to hamper efforts to stem transmission. In a 2022 study for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I analyzed the national and international response to the 2018–2020 outbreak and proposed a variety of ways international responders could have done things differently. Three recommendations from that study remain relevant for the current outbreak: Treat conflict and political economy analysis as central to the design of the health response: In 2018, WHO did not request MONUSCO’s analysis of the security and political landscape into which it was deploying, and MONUSCO was not informed in advance of several key WHO decisions. These included WHO’s decision to engage personnel from the Agence Nationale de Renseignements, a state security service notorious in eastern DRC for human rights abuses, as “community liaisons” who in practice helped direct where the response deployed. That arrangement, documented by the Congo Research Group, created perverse incentives, securitized the response, and lowered public trust in the health response. Position peace and security actors at arm’s length from health activities: There is a critical distinction between using security actors to provide a generally permissive security environment for a health response and using them to provide direct, proximate security. Using uniformed personnel to escort vehicles, guard clinic perimeters, or cordon off health facilities changes the character of the intervention in the eyes of affected communities. The 2018–2020 experience in Beni and Butembo demonstrated how rapidly the proximity of security actors to the health response led that response to be associated with them, sparking hostility against it. While MONUSCO and national security services may have a role in promoting security during the health response, they should clearly distinguish themselves from humanitarian and health operations. Balance the urgency of epidemic response with community engagement and operational flexibility: The “no regrets” posture that prevailed in 2018 produced the conditions that ultimately undermined its effectiveness. Public health measures only function if affected populations trust them enough to participate; securitized responses that treat communities as obstacles rather than partners are counterproductive. In practice, this means accepting slower initial reach in exchange for community-acceptable delivery—local responders rather than teams parachuted in from Kinshasa, motorcycles rather than Land Cruisers, and burial practices negotiated with families rather than imposed on them. WHO’s Global Health and Peace Initiative, and Its Limits To its credit, WHO has not ignored the 2018–2020 experience. In the years following the outbreak, the organization developed the Global Health and Peace Initiative (GHPI), built around two pillars: (1) making health programming “conflict-sensitive” by extending the “do no harm” principle into operational practice and (2) where conditions allow, making it “peace-responsive” by designing health interventions to actively contribute to peace outcomes such as social cohesion, dialogue, and community resilience. The initiative is likely to influence WHO’s thinking as it rapidly designs and rolls out its response to the current crisis. In a 2023 paper for the International Peace Institute, I argued that while the GHPI’s conceptual direction is broadly correct, its operationalization in violent conflict settings carries risks that have not yet been adequately addressed. Two in particular could present challenges for the response in eastern DRC. First, it is unclear how WHO and its partners in the field, including organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, will reconcile the principles of conflict sensitivity and humanitarian impartiality when the two pull in opposing directions. For example, even if a conflict-sensitive analysis identifies that delivering a particular intervention will exacerbate conflict dynamics (e.g., if negotiating access through a non-state armed group will entrench that group’s position), that intervention may still be compelled to proceed under the principle of humanitarian impartiality. The GHPI offers no framework for managing that tradeoff. Second, the initiative holds that programming “must be led at national level—from national authorities down to the community level.” This instinct to promote national ownership was borne of the lessons of the 2014-2016 Ebola crisis in West Africa, where the UN was criticized for bypassing national institutions. However, this principle becomes highly problematic when the state is itself a party to the conflict. In eastern DRC, much of the population views Congolese state institutions with hostility born of long experience. Deferring to national ownership without qualification risks reproducing the legitimacy problem that fueled community resistance in 2018 and could empower the predatory actors the response should be insulated from. The outbreak in the DRC demands a more localized, nuanced process for deciding on the role of national actors, grounded in thorough conflict analysis. The Way Forward The international response in eastern DRC will succeed or fail—and it is critical that it succeed—on its ability to implement emergency public health measures within the region’s long-standing social, political, and security quagmire. This will require three deliberate moves from the outset: (1) joint conflict and political-economy analysis to shape deployment decisions rather than follow them; (2) a security posture of less proximate protection combined with negotiated community-level access; and (3) a response built on localized approaches to engaging existing community structures and calibrating the role of national actors. Many further challenges will emerge that will demand difficult choices—not least the reconciliation of the dilemmas innate to the GHPI—but the decisions international responders make in the next weeks could have profound implications for regional and international public health. Originally Published in the Global Observatory
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday extended Eid greetings to Chief of Defence Forces and Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir, Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Babar, and Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Naveed Ashraf, Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said. In his telephonic communications, the prime minister paid tribute to the professional capabilities of the armed forces and their services and sacrifices for national security, the PMO said. “The prime minister said the nation was proud of its brave soldiers and the unwavering commitment and sacrifices of the armed forces of Pakistan.” The PMO said that PM Shehbaz prayed for the country’s security, progress and prosperity, and “paid tribute specially to the officers and personnel who were performing their duties for the defence of the homeland even on the occasion of Eid”. Meanwhile, CDF Munir and the services chiefs thanked the prime minister for his Eid greetings and prayed for happiness, peace and prosperity for the entire nation on Eidul Azha, the PMO said. “They reaffirmed their resolve that the armed forces of Pakistan are fully prepared at all times for the defence and security of the country,” it concluded. Earlier in the day, PM Shehbaz also extended heartfelt greetings to the people of Pakistan and the entire Muslim Ummah on the occasion of Eidul Azha. In his message, he said that he observed that the spirit of sacrifice, unity, and solidarity guaranteed lasting cohesion and sustainable progress in the life of nations.
Company founded by Yaron Finkelstein received contract to advise on antisemitism under a limited tender ‘due to an absence of competition’ Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal, hired Scott Morrison’s former principal adviser on a $200,000 contract without a public tender process, with department officials saying his skills could not be provided by any other business. Society Advisory Pty Ltd, the company founded by Yaron Finkelstein – Morrison’s former principal private secretary – received the 12-month contract to work with Segal until April 2027, coinciding with the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. Continue reading...
Officers were ‘placed at significant risk, being in a gunfight armed with 9mm Glocks against long-arms’, NSW police deputy commissioner says Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Police were outgunned at the Bondi massacre on 14 December, armed with 9mm Glock pistols in a gun battle against rifles, the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion has heard. New South Wales police deputy commissioner David Hudson gave evidence to the commission that police officers put themselves in danger to shoot and neutralise the attackers. Continue reading...