By Bruce Jay Wasser* CHICAGO, USA | 25 January 2025 (IDN) — The return of Donald Trump to the presidency promises to be a time of significant national division and turmoil. He undoubtedly will pursue policies that reflect international bellicosity and a frightening dedication to xenophobia, misogyny, and intolerance. I take him seriously when he […]
Time to Change Course and the Conversation from Doomsday to Peace Day
By Alice Slater*, Toward Freedom NEW YORK | 24 January 2025 (IDN) — The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with the advice of Albert Einstein and other scientists from the Manhattan Project who developed the atomic bomb, established a Doomsday Clock, in 1947, to illustrate the annihilating danger the earth is facing since the creation of […]
Money Wins Wars
By Ramesh Jaura BERLIN | 24 January 2025 (IDN) — A new study reveals that financial resources play a significant role in determining the outcome of military conflicts. The comprehensive analysis of over 700 armed conflicts between 1977 and 2013 shows a clear causal effect of increased military spending on war outcomes, raising important questions […]
Haiti Calls for Restitution and Reparations
TURIN, Italy | 23 January 20254 (IDN) — The international movement Colonialism Reparation has welcomed Haiti’s decision to once again start to ask the restitution of the “independence indemnity” and reparations for the colonial period. It is also calling France to agree to apologize and compensate for the entire colonial period, bearing in mind its […]
Peace With China Is Far More Important Than Power Over China
By Jonathan Power* LUND, Sweden | 21 January 2025 (IDN) —The West, the US especially, has got itself into a fretful mood over the rise of China. Quite unnecessarily so. The Chinese growth rate is slowing. As a BBC commentator said recently, reviewing this week’s government-issued statistics, China never will hit double digit growth again. […]
Human Rights Watch Takes Stock of 2024: A Year of Reckoning
By Jan Servaes* BANGKOK, Thailand | 18 January 2025 (IDN) — The Human Rights Watch Report 2025 was recently launched in Bangkok under the title “2024: A Year of Reckoning”. The press conference, which can also be followed via YouTube, started with a video message from Tirana Hassan, HRW Director General, who tried to put […]
Myanmar Four Years After the Coup
By Jan Servaes BANGKOK | 15 January 2025 (IDN) — Almost four years after the February 1, 2021 coup in Myanmar, the military junta’s widespread and systematic abuses against the population—including arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings and aerial bombardments of civilians—amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes. For ordinary citizens, the human rights situation […]
Will Putin and Trump Meet in Budapest?
By Fehér Péter* BUDAPEST | 12 January 2025 (IDN) — Vladimir Dzhabarov, the first deputy chairman of the Russian parliament’s upper house committee on international affairs, mentioned in an interview that he considers Hungary an ideal location for a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. This was the first specific indication that the Hungarian […]
Why 2024 Was the Deadliest Year on Record for Reporters
By Kristin Skare Orgeret* OSLO, Norway | 9 January 2025 (IDN) — The past year has been the deadliest for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began tracking fatalities in 1992. Since 7 October 2023, at least 146 journalists have been killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, though the actual numbers […]
The Next UN Secretary-General — Must be the Turn of a Woman
By Dr Palitha Kohona Former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN and Former Ambassador to China COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 8 January 2025 (IDN) — With Antonio Guterres’s term of office tapering off, there is increasing chatter in the corridors of the United Nations in New York regarding his potential successor. The interest in […]