READING between the lines and pathways of the national assembly complex, it is rather plain that the objective behind restoring the complex keeping to the original plans of Louis I Kahn is not just about exercising loyalty to the designer’s dream but the removal…

THE visit last week to Sri Lanka of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon was in contrast to his previous visit in 2009, a few weeks after the country’s three decade-long internal war came to its violent denouement…

GREAT writers and intellectuals give us a vocabulary that allows us to make sense of reality. They excavate depths that we, without their help, are unable to fathom. We are captive to systems of power until we can name the dominant…

ON AUGUST 29 this year, Union defence minister Manohar Parrikar and US defence secretary Ashton Carter signed a Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement, an agreement that the US has assiduously…

IN NICE, less than a month after the Bastille Day attack on the Promenade des Anglais, which killed 86 people and was claimed by the Islamic State group, something quite odd happened…

SOMETIMES important events take place after stories connected with them have been taken off the front pages, when anchors have moved onto to new drama…

WHAT a fine race it has become! Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are competing in it as a who is the ‘tougher guy/gal’ in what could be easily described as a 21st century Tarantino-style (or Scorsese-style) political pulp fiction gore…

LEONARDO Boff, is a Franciscan monk who was one of the main creators of the liberation theology-until he decided in 1992 to leave the priesthood…

RUSSIA’S higher education sector is braced for significant cuts, with up to 10,300 jobs disappearing. At the end of July 2016, the online Gazeta.ru daily published an…

Even though it is undeniable that many militaries and non-state armed groups do, in fact, use human shields, the potential ramifications of the mere accusation are extremely worrisome…

Dilma Rousseff entered the senate and calmly stared down her accusers. She left with her head held high after exhorting those Senators to vote with their conscience…

Empire has not died. It has simply evolved, with much of that evolution being superficial and the underlying networks and methods remaining nearly indistinguishable to those employed by the Romans, British and even by 19th century American ‘Manifest Destiny’, writes Joseph Thomas…

A CLASS Eight girl called Risha was knifed to death near her school. Her alleged killer was a man who had been stalking her for several months…

BEN Ehrenreich, an American journalist with an eye for the ironic an ear for the perfect succinct phrase, has created pictures of both village and town life of Palestine under the occupation, behind the Apartheid Wall, and inner walls…

PAKISTAN’S bicameral legislature is dominated by feudals and capitalists, with the political parties that represent the working class too weak to reach the legislature…

Pakistan’s generals blame their country’s cycle of political violence, including a recent bombing in the Baluch capital of Quetta, on groups in Afghanistan…

THE constitutional reform process moving forward rapidly, though without a high level of publicity, indicates that the government leadership has a businesslike approach to political reform…

HAKAN Fidan, chief of Turkish Intelligence, did not give much credence to warnings by Russian agencies that a coup to oust president Tayyip Erdogan was in the works. But he shared the information with others on a ‘need-to-know’…

IT SEEMS it’s not enough that US defence secretary Ash Carter and his generals engage in games of nuclear chicken with Russia by provocations in Ukraine, NATO manoeuvres on Russia’s borders and activation of highly-dangerous ballistic missile defence installations on Russia’s perimeter…