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 […]
Rabbinical Cease Fire in Gaza: A New Oslo?
By James E. Jennings* ATLANTA, USA | 18 January 2025 (IDN) — The Israelis are very good at two things: bombing the hell out of places all over the Middle East using American planes and bombs and writing complicated “peace” deals that wrap the Palestinians in a morass of words so that peace never comes. […]
India Takes Yet Another Step Toward Sending Humans to the Moon
By Devinder Kumar* NEW DELHI | 17 January 2025 (IDN) — The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)—which has been working on key technologies to realise its vision of setting up a space station by 2035 and sending humans to the Moon by 2040—on January 16 morning successfully demonstrated space docking, or the joining of two […]
WHO Appeals for USD 1.5 billion to Tackle Unprecedented Global Health Crisis
By Jaya Ramachandran GENEVA | 17 January 2025 (IDN) — The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued 2025 Health Emergency Appeal (HEA), calling for US$ 1.5 billion to support an unparalleled global health crisis, with 305 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Conflict, climate change, epidemics, and displacement have converged to create this […]
Combating Climate Change Strengthens Rather Than Stifles Economic Growth
By Dr. Alon Ben-Meir* NEW YORK | 16 January 2025 (IDN) — Climate change deniers, including President Trump, insist that there is no such thing as climate change and that measures taken to combat it only decrease economic productivity and stifle growth. In fact, the opposite is true; a plethora of scientific evidence suggests that […]
Sri Lanka: Better Manage the Water Tanks to Ensure Food Security
By Mohan Seneviratne* COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 16 January 2025 (IDN) — Water is at the centre of economic and social development. It influences whether communities are healthy places to live, whether farmers can grow food and underpins natural ecosystems. Moreover, humans experience Climate Change through water be it floods, droughts, cyclones or tsunamis. Sri […]
Do Carbon Markets Foster New Scramble for African Land?
By Ramesh Jaura BERLIN | 15 January 2025 (IDN) — A new study has slammed the growth of carbon offset markets for fuelling a fresh scramble for African land and “perpetuating colonial-era exploitation”. This instrument of emissions trading was introduced by the Kyoto Protocol in 2005 to confront the unrelenting challenge to limit global warming […]
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 […]
Twenty Million Radicalizing Muslims Pose a Challenge
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 14 January 2025 (IDN) — Besides dealing with Ukraine, Russia stands at a major crossroads as it works out how exactly to deal with the 14.5 million ethnic Muslims that live inside its borders. If, added to this are the migrant workers from Central Asia and Azerbaijan, the total […]
Trump, again… Everything About Him Is Unsettlingly Peculiar
The writer is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book Writing for Media and Monetising It. ABUJA, Nigeria | 14 January 2025 (IDN) — On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the U.S., on 19 January 2017, I wrote an article I could easily write now. It was […]