Cartel members are not always a congenial bunch. Relations can get frosty and brittle over time. With the United Arab Emirates, membership of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has not been without its troubles, not helped by the increasingly snarky relationship it shares with the group’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia. To be part of such a group entails mindful restraint, an understanding about production targets and a curbing of individual initiative. The statute of the group states its goal: to ”devise ways and means of ensuring the stabilisation of prices in international oil markets with a view to eliminating harmful and unnecessary fluctuations.”

The group has been battered of late, notably in the field of diminished supply. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz arising from the Iran War saw a fall of almost 8 million barrels of oil per day in March, a 27.5% decline from February numbers. Supply falls were registered in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Iraq. The fall for the UAE was in the order of 1.5 million barrels a day. But the Emirates has also suffered punishing barrages from Iranian missile and drone attacks, a problem officials feel has been inadequately addressed by such groups as the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League.

On May 28 April, the UAE announced it was exiting OPEC and the umbrella OPEC+ organisation ”effective 1 May 2026.” (The departure follows that of Qatar in 2019, when its priorities shifted to the pursuit of natural gas.) The decision reflected, in the hideous, dead jargon of middle management, ”the UAE’s long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile, including accelerated investment in domestic energy production, and reinforces its commitment to a responsible, reliable, and forward-looking role in global energy markets.”

The usual anodyne, non-committal commitments are noted. ”Following its exit, the UAE will continue to act responsibly, bringing additional production to market in a gradual, measured manner, aligned with demand and market conditions.” The decision did not alter the state’s ”commitment to global market stability or its approach based on cooperation with producers and consumers.” Instead, it enhanced the ”ability to respond to evolving market needs.”

Behind this abominable language lies a less than obscured objective. The UAE has been the country with the second highest spare production capacity in OPEC. Being so placed, it was a runner-up in terms of influencing production levels to ease oil prices. Under the quota restrictions of the group, the state was limited to 3 to 3.5 million barrels per day, a threshold that effectively meant lost revenue. In words spoken to The New York Times, the country’s energy minister, Suhail Al Mazrouei, ”The world needs more energy, the world needs more resources and UAE wanted to be unconstrained by any groups.”

The inevitable commentary on the implications of the UAE’s exit has followed. The BBC economics editor, Faisal Islam, ponders them: ”It’s not just that the UAE, when it can get its oil fully back on the market by sea or pipeline, is likely to target 5 million barrels per day production. Saudi Arabia might respond with an oil price war that the UAE’s more diversified economy could withstand, but poorer OPEC members might not.”

Priya Walia, oil analyst at the consultancy Ryland Energy, offers this assessment: ”By stepping outside the quota framework, it reshapes future expectations and weakens OPEC+”s control over spare capacity, as well as the assumption that future supply will be managed through coordinated restraint.”

Emirati officials have dared to dream, speaking of new pipelines from the oil fields of Abu Dhabi that will bypass the Strait of Hormuz and link the port of Fujairah. The motivation for such sentiments is captured by remarks made by Yossi Abu of the Israeli company NewMed Energy. ”You need oil pipelines, railway connectivity, throughout the region, onshore, without giving others bottlenecks to choke us.”

Inspiration for this has accrued from Saudi Arabia’s own East-West pipeline, running for 1200 kilometres and built in in the 1980s for fear of the Strait’s closure during the Iraq-Iran War. The pipeline serves to deliver a daily complement of 7 million barrels of oil to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, avoiding the Hormuz tangle.

Issues of market control and spare capacity regarding oil will turn out, over time, to be matters of diminishing value. Across the globe, the Iran War has shaken governments into considering, with frantic urgency, the issue of energy security. Consumers have also made the charge. In March, for instance, the UK saw a rise in plug-in hybrid sales of 47%. Pure electric vehicle (EV) sales rose by 24%. While petrol engines still retained their primacy, they only do so with a falling share of new car registrations (44%) compared with 51.4% for hybrid vehicles and EVs, up from 45% the previous year.

China continues roaring away with its mammoth electrification program as well, a matter that has served to soften global shocks in oil and gas arising from the war. While the European response to oil shocks remains dreary, antiquated and predictable (that same can be said about countries such as Australia)—the usual frenetic diplomatic scuttling to secure more reliable supply, temporary tax cuts and emergency packages for aggrieved consumers—Beijing is clearly of a different view. Given that electrification insulates households from steep rises in fuel costs, the UAE will have to make a dash if it is to raise as much revenue from its oil reserves as it can. But they will still be in a bind till the tankers resume their uninterrupted journeys through the Strait of Hormuz.

For the 15th time in 18 months, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against reforms proposed by Belgium’s Arizona government seeking to reduce pension rights, introduce harsher working conditions, and cut social budgets to finance war and armament. On 12 May, “75,000 people filled the streets of Brussels: workers from the public and private sector, metalworkers, caregivers, teachers, public service employees, NGOs, cultural workers, youth, feminist, democratic and peace movements,” stated the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA).

“What is disputed today is not just one measure or the other,” the party added. “This is about the whole Arizona project: a model where the rights of the working class are sacrificed to give gifts to the ultra-rich and free up more and more millions for war. To this model, we oppose another choice: social justice, respect for work, solidarity and peace.”

Since coming to power, the current administration has proposed numerous measures that trade unions and progressive forces warn would harm the quality of life and working conditions of thousands of people. Among other things, the De Wever-Bouchez government pursued an increase to retirement age, penalties for workers retiring earlier than expected, and reducing protections for night work. Thanks to continuous popular mobilization, it was forced to backtrack on many of these measures—the pension reform, for one, has been postponed again recently.

“The backbone of our society has been pushing back against this government for 18 months now—and with success,” wrote Peter Mertens, PTB-PVDA General Secretary, on the day of the demonstration. “People are rediscovering their collective power. That is something you cannot undo.”

On Tuesday, he added, people were back on the streets “with a clear message to the government: nobody wants the pension reform, nobody wants the policy of working longer for less pension, nobody wants the pension penalty. Nobody wants exploding energy bills while billions flow to weapons and oil multinationals line their pockets.”

In addition to the country’s largest trade union organizations, FGTB-ABVV and ACV-CSC, mobilizations were joined by blocs from all parts of society. “Today we were at the national demonstration to demand an immediate end to measures that are making life even harder for those in the most vulnerable situations,” social services and health centers’ federations reported, echoing growing concerns about income levels and the cost of living crisis in Belgium. “Social services are facing ever-increasing demand under increasingly difficult conditions. This is unsustainable.”

Others pointed out that the erosion of workers’ rights in Belgium came hand in hand with falling possibilities of supporting popular struggles around the world. The organization Viva Salud, working in international health solidarity, wrote: “While the Arizona government is hitting people here with its attacks on our pensions, people elsewhere in the world are also suffering the consequences of cuts to international solidarity. In short, the price for this government policy is being paid by everyone, everywhere.”

The mobilization concluded with an appeal to join a new massive protest in Brussels on 14 June, focusing on resistance to European rearmament and war policies.

“Together, we’ve already forced the government to back down on several crucial issues, such as pensions and end-of-career provisions,” FGTB-ABVV wrote. “Together, we continue to make our voices heard. Together, we continue the fight. Because action pays off.”

On 8 May and 9, left and progressive movements in Europe marked Victory Day—the 81 anniversary of fascism’s defeat in World War II. “For the Left this cannot be merely an act of remembrance,” wrote the European Left Party. “It is a call to continue the struggle for a peaceful and antifascist Europe.”

Victory Day memorializes Nazi Germany’s official surrender in 1945, marking the end of war in this part of the world and the victory of partisans, national resistance movements, Red Army soldiers, and allied forces. The extreme atrocities committed by Nazis and fascists over previous years—notably mass persecution, torture, and killing of Jews, Roma, communists, and other groups—resulted in millions of deaths, with many more killed in combat and bombardments: the USSR alone lost 27 million citizens during World War II.

Events took place across the region to commemorate the anniversary. Many emphasized similarities between trends that led to the rise of fascism and today’s militarization and armament, calling for urgent action. The European Left Party echoed words of Mauthausen concentration camp survivors, who pledged after liberation: “We are determined to carry on the struggle against imperialism and nationalist hatred. The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our goal.”

While progressives view Victory Day as a lesson for future action, many local, national, and EU bodies paid lip service to the day’s origin while erasing contributions of communist and resistance groups from official history. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas focused exclusively on Europe Day—occurring in the same period—featuring EU flags and highlighting the bloc’s stated aims of “unity, cooperation, and democratic values.” During a press conference, Kallas stated that not all EU countries can celebrate 8 to 9 May as Victory Day because of their Soviet past—which she described as a period of “atrocities.”

Berlin authorities pursued a similar discourse, banning, once again, the display of USSR and communist symbols during celebrations traditionally held next to Soviet memorials. The ban extended to Russian Federation flags and songs like “Katyusha” and “Kalinka.” “Since according to Russian propaganda, Russian soldiers are fighting Nazis in Ukraine, there is a direct link between the victory over fascism in World War II and the Russian Federation’s current war in Ukraine,” Berlin Police wrote when announcing the ban.

“The ban,” wrote the German Communist Party (DKP), “is a slap in the face to all those who, on 8 and 9 May, pay tribute at Soviet memorials to the tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers who fell in the battle of Berlin. At the same time, it is an insult to the peoples who, as part of or alongside the Red Army, liberated Europe from fascism.”

“Despite anti-Soviet bans and restrictions, we remembered in humility the fallen soldiers of the Red Army and their families, who sacrificed everything in the fight against German fascism,” the DKP added.

In Italy, a large demonstration took place in Rome, reclaiming the narrative around World War II from revisionists. Potere al Popolo’s Marta Collot stressed the importance of ensuring solidarity with ongoing popular struggles around the world—notably in Palestine and Cuba—drawing inspiration from sacrifices made by communist movements and activists. It was largely communists and partisan fighters who gave their lives to defeat fascist forces, she emphasized, driven by a vision of a different world.

“They are the ones who have lifted millions and millions of people out of poverty,” she said. “They are the ones who believe that, in the face of barbarism, human dignity comes before any kind of profit.”

“Socialism, as well as communist men and women, remind us that there is always an alternative to barbarism; that there is—and that we need—a vision that allows us to imagine a different world so that we can build it,” Collot added. “In the face of barbarism, the only possible alternative is communism.”

Hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets all across India on Tuesday, 12 May, in solidarity with the unorganised workers facing state repression in various parts of the country, particularly in the National Capital Regions (NCR).

A joint platform made up of the Central Trade Unions (CTUs) and several independent sectoral federations made the call for the protest, calling 12 May “National Demands Day”.

The CTUs include all major left-leaning trade union federations in the country, such as the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS), and Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU), among others, with millions of members each.

The workers staged lunch-hour protests, sit-ins, and rallies at factory gates and industrial clusters across the country, carrying banners and posters and shouting chants against “inhuman exploitation”. Slogans focused particularly on contractual and non-regular workers.

The protesters condemned the brutal police repression of the striking workers in industrial manufacturing sectors in Noida, Manesar, Gurugram and Faridabad in the National Capital Region (NCR). Workers in these areas produce mobile phones, electronic components, garments, auto parts, and medicines.

The police from the right-wing-ruled states, such as Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, have launched “a direct assault on innocent workers and people, with the state machinery acting openly in the interests of the corporates”, a statement from the CTUs issued on 6 May says.

“Over 1,000 workers were arrested, with police using raids, repression, and surveillance to create a reign of terror.” They have arrested several “trade union leaders and wrongfully framed them” as “external” or “anti-national”. Some of these leaders and activists are still in prison.

The CTU’s statement called the repression “nothing short of a state-backed corporate offensive against the democratic rights of the workers.”

The CTUs claim that this “militant upsurge of workers’ resistance” is “against the inhuman exploitation of contractual industrial workers” and a “continuation of the momentum” built during the 12 February General Strike, in which over 300 million workers from all across the country participated, demanding the withdrawal of the four new labour codes.

Central demands

Though the agitation of workers has forced the respective state governments to hurriedly revise the wages, which they had failed to do for years, such revisions have largely been termed a sham by the CTUs. Even with the hikes announced, the “wages in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana remain far below those in Delhi despite identical living costs.”

Given the inadequacy of the wage revisions and continued state repression, the National Demands Day raised the following demands:

1. Inflation-adjusted minimum wages, which should not be less than Rs 26,000 per month (approx. 270 US dollars).

2. Withdrawal of all cases against the agitating workers and immediate and unconditional release of all workers and activists.

3. Immediate withdrawal of the four new anti-worker labour codes.

4. Initiation of a tripartite dialogue with the trade unions and convening of the Indian Labour Conference.

5. Strict adherence to the 8-hour working day and double overtime wages

6. Equal pay and end of contractual work.

More agitation is coming.

The CTUs have claimed that India has seen a phenomenal rise in contractual employment, with around 42% of all employees in the manufacturing sector working on contracts in 2023-24. Most of these workers do not have any protection and are often forced to work beyond the stipulated working hours with no substantial wages.

The workers also face discrimination based on the nature of their employment and their gender, with women workers often paid less than their male counterparts and often subjected to workplace harassment.

In workplace and wage-related agitations, the governments in most of the Indian states have, instead of engaging in dialogue with the workers to provide relief, adopted the path of repression and taken the side of the management.

The state’s use of repression and smear campaigns, branding the agitating workers and their leaders as “external” or “anti-national”, is a means to delegitimise the genuine struggles, the CTU’s statement says.

It warned that the failure of the state to listen to workers’ demands and unleashing acts of repression and smear campaigns will make it impossible for India to have any “lasting industrial peace”.

The government of India, however, despite consistent protest and warnings by millions of workers for months now, has refused to listen to their concerns. On 8 May, it went ahead and notified the final rules of the four labour codes.

This has prompted the trade unions to burn the copies of the act and issue calls for further agitation in the coming days.

On 10 May, Robert Kagan, the high priest of neoconservative thought, the bell ringer for muscular interventionism and general American meddlesomeness, lamented in The Atlantic that the United States had suffered a unique defeat in its efforts to subjugate Iran. The article says much about Kagan’s own identification with the obvious, some feat given the military fancy and fantasy that continues to blot the current Trump administration.

Be that as it may, he finds the Iran War dishing out a defeat to the United States of unique quality, one that “can neither be repaired nor ignored.” No ultimate American triumph could emerge, and nothing would “undo or overcome the harm done” to “return to the status quo ante.” The Strait of Hormuz would not be “open” as it was prior to 28 February. Iran’s regional position, far from being blunted, had improved. China and Russia had been strengthened; the US “substantially diminished.” “Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.”

This prompting was undoubtedly due to the claim made by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 5 May in the White House Press Briefing Room that Operation Epic Fury had concluded, though US President Donald Trump, ever keen to keep an iron in the fire, huffed that Iran had to “agree to give what has been agreed to.” (The “what” is always the problem in Trumpland.) Not doing so would result in bombing “at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.” The President had also “paused” Project Freedom, that massive prop of wishful thinking involving the use of the US military to escort commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The pause—effectively a breezy termination—had been induced, in no small part, by the grumpiness of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, worried that adventurism in the Strait would incite yet another round of Iranian attacks on Gulf states. To show his disapproval, the Crown Prince had refused to permit the use of the Prince Sultan Airbase for US operations.

Iran’s airstrikes had also shown far more bite than was initially reported, at least in the Western media stable. Some of this can be put down to the restrictions on the release of satellite imagery supplied by commercial providers Vantor and Planet. Both have been compliant with the Pentagon’s request to either limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of timely imagery covering the region. The Iranians, through state-affiliated news outlets, felt no such restraint.

On 6 May, The Washington Post, after examining Iranian satellite imagery, reported that some 228 structures of pieces of equipment at US military sites across the Middle East since 28 February had been damaged and destroyed. Hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, vital radar, communications and air defence equipment had been struck by Iran’s forces. The dangers posed by Iranian strikes had been so formidable as to force some US bases in the region to relocate personnel out of missile range.

In its analysis, the paper claims to have verified some 109 images, aided by a comparison with lower-resolution imagery obtained from the European Union’s Copernicus satellite system, and any high-resolution images at hand from Planet. The Iranian images also confirmed previously reported damage or destruction inflicted on a number of US military assets: the radomes at Camp Arifjan and Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait and at the 5 Fleet Headquarters; the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defence radars and equipment located at Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and two sites in the United Arab Emirates; a second satellite communications site located at al-Udeid Air Base, and an E-3 Sentry command and control aircraft and a refuelling tanker at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

The analysts roped in to examine the images were impressed. Mark Cancian, a former Marine Corps colonel and senior advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), found the strikes to be “precise.” “There are no random craters indicating misses.” William Goodhind of the open-access research project Contested Ground, in addition to noting the destruction of equipment, fuel storage and air base infrastructure, found damage to “soft targets, such as gyms, food halls and accommodation.”

To add stinging insult to burgeoning injury, the defences used to cope with Iranian strikes proved staggeringly draining and disproportionately costly. The CSIS estimates the use of at least 190 THAAD interceptors and 1,060 Patriot interceptors between 28 February and 8 April, running down inventories of both at 53% and 43% respectively. And just to improve the mood in Washington, Tehran, according to an analysis by the US intelligence community, retains roughly 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and roughly 70% of its pre-war missile stockpile. Vague as they are, that’s another objective of Operation Epic Fury dashed.

While the childish pantomime of non-diplomacy continues (Trump rages that the ceasefire with Tehran, given the latest “piece of garbage” of a counter proposal, is on “life support”), Washington is banking on a strangulation policy through yet another project of dubious merit: Economic Fury. “As Iran’s military desperately tries to regroup, Economic Fury will continue to deprive the regime of funding for its weapons programs, terrorist proxies, and nuclear ambitions,” tooted the Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on 11 May. “Treasury will continue to cut the Iranian regime off from the financial networks it uses to carry out terrorist acts and to destabilize the global economy.”

Economic Fury, still in its swaddled infancy, also risks early retirement. Iranian stubbornness and stout resilience continues to trouble analysts in the intelligence community. A CIA analysis circulated this month concluded that Tehran could withstand the US naval blockade for between 90 to 120 days before experiencing dramatic economic deterioration. Iran’s economy may be in a wretched state, but parochial determination has a certain staying power. Bureaucratic bickering, however, often finds its way, and a senior US intelligence official (that could be anyone) has surfaced to counter the claims of the assessment. Genuine, extensive and rapid economic damage is being inflicted. The US remains in the ascendant.

These varied intelligence assessments of decorative astrology cannot escape the dunderheaded reasoning that undergirded the war, along with the failure to appreciate the shocks caused, not merely by Iran’s closure of the Hormuz Strait but its systematic shredding of the US security guarantee for Gulf states. Unlike the fumbling, inventive antics shown prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the CIA and allied intelligence services were well aware that a campaign against Iran was freighted with terrible risk. Ensnared and trapped, Trump will find it hard to avoid using the good offices of China’s President Xi Jinping to lean on Beijing’s ally. If so, it is bound to come at an exacting price.

On 9 May, thousands of Malians in various cities mobilized to express their support for the national armed forces and the sovereigntist popular military government defending the country from attacks by multiple foreign-backed terror groups.​

In the capital, Bamako—one of the six cities attacked on 25 April—citizens packed the Mamadou Konaté Stadium, which has a seating capacity of 5,500, to attend a gathering themed “For a Mali standing tall, united, at peace and secure.”​

Addressing the gathering, Ibrahim Cissé, president of the National Youth Council of Mali (CNJ), called on the young Malians to join the armed forces in ever greater numbers in the fight against terror groups, insisting, “We refuse to be a youth of spectators.”​

Speaking on behalf of Malian women, “We are all soldiers,” declared Kouyaté Sissoko, representative of the Coordination of Women’s Associations and NGOs of Mali (CAFO).​

Describing the attack on 25 April as “cowardly,” government spokesperson and Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation Brigadier General Issa Coulibaly said that “the Malian people have shown that they will not yield to fear or manipulation.”

About 650 km northeast of Bamako, the city of Mopti was also attacked, along with four other cities across the country, in a coordinated offensive by about 12,000 fighters of the Al-Qaeda affiliate, the JNIM, and a northern Tuareg separatist group, the MNLA.

Just over two weeks later, civil society leaders gathered at Mopti’s governorate building on 9 May. Addressing them, regional governor Brigadier General Daouda Dembélé assured that, “Mopti will remain strong and a bulwark.”​

Among the other demonstrations of support was the large public meeting, about 425 kilometers east of Bamako, at the Independence Square in the town of San, the administrative capital of the San region on the border with Burkina Faso.​

In her address to the gathering of youth, women leaders, and religious and traditional leaders, the mayor of the urban commune of San, Félicité Diarra, reiterated the support of the region’s people to the government, led by President Assimi Goïta.​

She also paid tribute to the civilians and soldiers killed on 25 April, including Defense Minister Sadio Camara, a lieutenant general posthumously elevated to General’s rank after he fell in battle. “We do not mourn our heroes, we celebrate them,” Coulibaly affirmed in an address, back in Bamako.

Within hours after its submission on Sunday, 10 May, US President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s fresh proposal for peace in the Middle East, calling it “totally unacceptable.”

The news of Trump’s rejection dashed hopes for peace in the region and intensified global economic concerns as oil prices rose further after the markets opened on Monday.

Trump’s rejection of the Iranian plan also shattered the chances of normalizing movement through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted since the beginning of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives.’ I don’t like it-Totally Unacceptable!” Trump said in a brief message on his social media post, on Sunday, 10 May.

According to reports in Iranian media, the latest Iranian peace proposal to end the US-Israeli war of aggression included most of the original demands made since the beginning of the ceasefire in April.

The Iranian demands include war reparations, recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, the end of all US sanctions, and the release of Iranian assets frozen by the US.

Iran’s proposals were in response to US proposals submitted to it last week through Pakistani mediators.

The US proposals had included demands such as the suspension of Iran’s nuclear enrichment and the simultaneous lifting of all restrictions on movement through the Persian Gulf, in return for lifting all US sanctions and unfreezing Iranian assets.

Responding to Trump’s rejection of his country’s proposals, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a post on X that “dialogue or negotiations” does not mean surrender or retreat and Iran will continue to uphold its rights and defend its interests.

Concerns for wider impact

The Iranian proposal also included the end of Israeli aggression in Lebanon and sought a guarantee that there will be no attacks on the country in the future.

Esmail Baghaei, official spokesperson of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs questioned Trump’s response to his country’s proposals on Monday, claiming there was nothing unreasonable in it, Press TV reported.

“Everything we proposed in the plan was reasonable and generous, and it is for the good of the region and the world,” Baghaei said, addressing a weekly press briefing in Tehran.

It is regrettable, Baghaei said, that the US continues to put maximalist demands under the influence of the “Israeli regime” and refuses to engage with Iran’s proposals in “good faith.”

Hours after Trump rejected the Iranian proposal, global oil prices once again crossed 100 US dollars per barrel.

The prices, which were much higher before the ceasefire was announced in the first week of April, had remained below 100 US dollars for weeks amid anticipation of a negotiated settlement.

Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest energy companies, claimed on Sunday that the world has lost around one billion barrels of oil since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on 28 February.

Its CEO Amin Nasir warned that it will still take months for the global energy prices to normalize if the war ends now.

Impact on global economy

The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which almost a quarter of global energy supplies pass, has created an energy crisis across the world, with countries in South and South-East Asia impacted the most.

On Sunday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the citizens of India to reduce their consumption of oil and imported items, citing the prolonged crisis in West Asia.

India imports more than 85% of its energy needs, mostly from countries in the Persian Gulf. The closure of the Hormuz and rise in prices have significantly impacted those supplies.

India has adopted measures such as restricting the supply of gas to industries and commercial establishments to protect the domestic supply, apart from raising the prices.

Similar measures have been adopted across the region in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other countries in South East Asia.

The 48 summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which concluded on Friday, 8 May, in Cebu, the Philippines decided to explore the possibility of a regional fuel stockpile and a standby mechanism for food security in the context of the ongoing crisis in West Asia.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has, apart from affecting the supply of energy products, also impacted the supply of fertilizers crucial for agriculture in the region and there is a fear that it may impact the overall production of food grains.

ASEAN countries import over 50% of their oil, 17% of their gas, and around 11% of their fertilizer needs from the Persian Gulf countries.

They make you do it—they, in this case, being the folly-fouled leaders of educational institutions—because it’s all in the name of organisational efficiency, productivity and purpose. Engage what is often erroneously called a Learning Management System (LMS), submitting personal details and papers and assessments into its maw. Instructors and academics are also made to generate intellectual profiles for subjects and courses, leaving students the false impression that what is not on the platform cannot surely exist. Should you be a conscientious objector to this hungry, data gobbling system, you are ostracised, condemned as a pencil loving Luddite.

On 30 April, Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based education technology company behind Canvas, a widely used LMS, temporarily went offline. On 1 May, the company confirmed that it had experienced a “cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor.” The problems had been largely sorted by 2 May, with Instructure promising continued monitoring and an investigation into how the attack took place. Its security system had been patched, certain credentials and access tokens revoked and reissued, and API (application programming interface) keys rotated “out of an abundance of caution.” Normal operations resumed the next day.

On 3 May, the specialist extortion group ShinyHunters, which publicly emerged in January 2020, added Instructure to its Tor-based site, boasting the theft of 3.65 terabytes of data by exploiting the “Free-For-Teacher” vulnerability in the Canvas platform. Information belonging to 275 million students, teachers and other individuals to some 8,809 education institutions across the globe had featured. Instructure, while admitting the hack had secured access to personal information (names, email addresses, student ID numbers and user messages), claimed to find “no evidence that passwords, dates of birth government identifiers, or financial information were involved.”

ShinyHunters sought negotiations with Instructure, threatening to leak its pilfered trove of data by 6 May. A new deadline was issued for 8 May. Instructure, at least publicly, was not having a bar of it, using its status page to declare the incident closed. On 7 May, in extending its deadline, the group began threatening specific institutions for extortion and injected a defacement message across 330 institutional Canvas login pages. “ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again),” crowed the note. “Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches’.”

The defacement prevented the effective use of Canvas accounts by staff and students, or any materials posted on the platform. Canvas assumed an offline maintenance status and suspended its Free-for-Teacher service. Stirrings of panic were registered through various student bodies regarding the loss of work, a disruption in exam preparation and block to the submission of research papers. A number of universities—Idaho State University and Penn State University, for instance—cancelled and postponed scheduled exams.

Instructure was then removed from ShinyHunters’ data leak portal, something the group tends to do when the target company initiates contact. The strategy for targeting individual institutions, however, was thrivingly alive, with a threat that the pinched data set would be released in the event negotiations with the group were not commenced.

The Halcyon Ransomware Research Center helpfully outlines the implications of the theft. Targeted phishing campaigns can be executed against staff, students and parents in the wake of exfiltration. “Leaked records can be used to impersonate school administrators, IT support, or financial aid offices in follow-on attacks.” Some mighty fine advice is also given. “Students, parents, and personnel at affected institutions should be considered, and institutions should issue phishing advisories and direct communications immediately.” Halcyon further recommends the deployment of “a dedicated anti-ransomware solution that detects and prevents ransomware runtime behaviour and data exfiltration attempts … and prevents tampering and network intrusion that enable propagation.”

Such detail and responsibility proved too much for many institutions to master. As the devil was to be found in the detail, detail would be spared. The best Adelaide University could do in a statement on 11 May was announce that access to Canvas had been restored, extensions to assessments granted, and encouragement to “all users to please remain alert to phishing or suspicious communications.” Students at the institution, already disgruntled by the tangles produced by the merger between the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia, were less than impressed. Ethan Brown, a second-year mechanical engineering student, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the university had been meagre in its communications with students. “It did take me a little while to actually find out [what happened] because I didn’t find out directly from the uni. I just heard about it from a friend and from articles online.”

Shannon Schmidt, reading for a double degree in international relations and arts, spoke of the disruption as messing “with a lot of things to do with my course material and submissions” while wondering why so many universities preferred one third-party provider. “I reckon all unis that have been affected should tighten security, if this wasn’t a wakeup call, then I don’t know what will be.”

The modern institution of learning has been long blighted by management philosophies that treasure budgets over intellectual prowess, false efficiency over the acquiring of knowledge. Dotty agreements are made with consultants who feed fetid dross to rapacious managers keen on restraining expenditure in favour of criminally inflated salaries. The response to the hacking of Canvas shows laziness, indifference and an almost tortious neglect about the welfare and privacy of students and staff.

Remarkably, these institutions refuse to consider alternative systems in the event of cyber failure, be it an indigenous platform unique to them and separate from cloud-based models, or some backup mechanism to circumvent disruptions. Then there is the heretical prospect of analogue options: the oral examination, the answer briskly penned on paper in a classroom. A sociology student interviewed by the University of Melbourne Student publication Farrago summed up matters with some crispness: “I think it works wonderfully well with the whole ‘going analogue’ vibe we’ve been cultivating as a culture this year,” she stated, sporting a Disc-man. “This should be a wake-up call to the university to invest in physical media. Get with the times!”

Unfortunately, little can be expected by way of redress. The managerial university remains a constipated entity hostile to the safety and welfare of those toilers who learn and work within it. “Platform concentration risk,” as the computer boffins like to term it, promises more mayhem, disguised as a digital nirvana.

Fiona Ben Chekroun, European co-coordinator of the BDS National Committee (BNC), recently visited Ljubljana, Rijeka and Zagreb, where she met with local Palestine solidarity groups and discussed Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaigns in Slovenia and Croatia. Peoples Dispatch spoke with Ben Chekroun about changes and breakthroughs in this arena since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023.

For the past 20 years, people around the world have responded to the BDS call launched by Palestinians to pressure Israel to comply with international law. “For me, it has always been very important to answer a Palestinian call, and that’s where I found my legitimacy and conviction that I was going in the right direction,” Ben Chekroun contextualized the call. “Because at some point, I’m answering to something coming from those who are oppressed and fighting, calling us to stand in solidarity by cutting all forms of complicity with the system that oppresses them.”

Exponential growth of activities

Like the overall solidarity movement with Palestine in Europe—which has grown stronger and more vast over the past two and a half years—BDS activities have also expanded. Ben Chekroun refers to an “exponential growth”: meaning that not only is the BNC seeing groups take shape in places where they were not present before, but these groups are also larger in absolute numbers. While this comes with challenges, it has significantly strengthened campaigns.

This growth has led to an organic expansion of new campaigns. “The campaign on ethical tourism called ‘No room for genocide‘ is one of these examples,” Ben Chekroun says, referencing drives to deny passage to war criminals and boycott accommodation platforms that profit from Israeli occupation. “That was literally a campaign born during the genocide, with the determination to prevent war criminals from circulating and having holidays from genocide with total impunity.”

It has also led to more intersectional alliances, an aspect that Ben Chekroun emphasizes is of particular importance. “You can see more and more trade unions adopting BDS guidelines and joining calls to action, coordinating with grassroots BDS groups and partners,” she points out. The same can be said, she adds, for other justice struggles, including climate, LGBTIQI+, and peace groups. “The climate movement made the link between colonialism, climate destruction and genocide; that’s how they were able to join a campaign directly against insurance company AXA or banks with comparable links such as Barclays in Britain,” Ben Chekroun says. “And you can also see LGBTIQI+ groups marching under the slogan ‘No pride in genocide.’”

“In Spain, they’ve been able to build a very large intersectional campaign with trade unions, political parties, grassroots groups, feminist groups, queer groups, and part of the climate justice movement. It was very broad, reaching even people in villages. At one point, you had 150 cities and villages having demonstrations at the same time, bringing up the same demands. This requires not only a lot of organization and coordination, but also building trust among different components of the Spanish state, which is very challenging due to its own history.”

“BDS has become much more widely known,” she points out. “Before, it was somehow always about explaining, over and over again, to the mainstream. That’s still the case when it comes to the strategy, but the words boycott, divestment, and sanction have become more present in the mainstream. And that means we also reach some spaces we weren’t able to reach before.”

The achievements of people-power

In Europe, Ben Chekroun says, there have been numerous incremental wins—“that are maybe not full wins, but are big steps in the right direction”—thanks to intersectional alliances and a bigger presence in the mainstream. “It’s amazing to think that it’s people-power that brought us to Israeli military companies being kicked out of weapons fairs and to vessels being either denied to dock or having their cargo confiscated—like in Italy recently, with the MSC vessels transporting military-grade steel to Israel,” Ben Chekroun says. “You can see the steps happening, and that’s because of people-power.”

Incremental wins and the growth of people’s power can be observed across sectors: from academic boycott calls that led to encampments or decisions to ban Israeli participation in programs—even in non-pro-Palestinian spaces like the UK Royal College of Defence Studies—to sports, from labor to culture and energy. The list of examples Ben Chekroun outlines covers everything from an ongoing call, endorsed by thousands of musicians and artists, to boycott Eurovision over Israel’s participation, to advocacy campaigns for local administrations and companies to adopt ethical procurement policies that would prevent them from collaborating with entities complicit in human rights infringements: not only in Gaza, but across the world.

Another clear victory, she adds, has recently come when Italian energy giant ENI decided to withdraw from an Israeli gas exploration consortium. “It has never been legal, ethically, or morally grounded to invest in Israel. But now it’s also becoming financially reckless—because Israel, even if its economy had been resilient before, is now increasingly becoming what we at the BDS movement call a shutdown nation.”

“It’s important to always name Israel for what it is: an apartheid, genocidal, settler colonial regime. And today, it is increasingly perceived by the majority of the world as a rogue state. If we take a step back and look at the global picture, Israel has never been as isolated as it is today, as weak as it is today—although it might appear strong at the same time because it is still backed by US imperialism.”

“The West has shielded Israel from accountability for seven decades”

Other spaces that have come within reach over the past two and half years can also be found in institutional politics: talk of sanctions on Israel has become much more widespread, Ben Chekroun says, with Belgium, Slovenia and Spain taking steps to introduce a partial military embargo on the occupation power. Another thing the Palestine solidarity movement in Europe has been able to achieve is positioning Palestine as the center of political conversation and activity in the region.

But it goes even beyond that, according to Ben Chekroun, as colonialism has become a legitimate target too. “That’s something that Palestinians have been able to do: in resisting and surviving genocide and still being able to make sure that their narrative is pushed—and pushing the line of those very colonial racist spaces that before were just dismissing everything.”

The results of this trend have been multifold, Ben Chekroun says. The spotlighting of European complicity in the genocide has unmasked this particular brand of hypocrisy in the West, while raising awareness in the Global South that what is happening in Gaza could easily be replicated elsewhere in the world. “Colombian President Gustavo Petro said it quite early in the genocide: this is a test, and we’re next if we don’t stop it,” Ben Chekroun recalls. “We’re seeing these tactics now being used in Lebanon, and in Cuba too. I think there’s definitely a consciousness in the Global South that what’s happening in Gaza is a consequence of this deadly system of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism at large.”

In Europe, the response has been different. On the one hand, Ben Chekroun points out, governments of the European core have been feeling the heat from solidarity movements. This pressure has pushed some countries to consider a different—tentatively more progressive—stand, as mirrored in the increased participation of countries in meetings of the Hague Group.

But this is far from a universal response. Other countries have tilted towards a more repressive tactic. “The West has shielded Israel from any form of accountability and supported the Israeli apartheid and settler colonial regime financially, economically, and diplomatically for seven decades,” she says. “In a way, we’re here today because of those policies, because the movement is responding to them. It has more space to do it [compared to other regions]—but at the same time, less and less space because the repression is growing as they see we’re able to shake the system.”

The crackdown on civil liberties we have been witnessing across Europe is a result of this, Ben Chekroun warns, adding that its impact will certainly not remain confined to Palestine solidarity.

Yet another outcome can be observed in Eastern Europe. “Sometimes people outside the region see Eastern Europe as a space where nothing can happen,” Ben Chekroun says, immediately countering that solidarity movements have been growing in this region as well. “These governments—in Hungary [PD note: the conversation took place before the inauguration of Peter Magyar’s administration], the Czech Republic, Romania, for example—are very much complicit. Elbit System, one of the biggest Israeli military companies, has settled in Romania.”

“It’s true that the context is very specific,” she adds. “The transition to capitalism has fragmented, diluted and destroyed the sense of community. Trade unions have been weakened, the politicization of people has also been weakened. So for us now it’s about how to connect these different things—the fight against corruption and democratic backsliding—with Palestine. Essentially, it’s about showing that if Elbit is coming to Romania, it’s because they’re feeling the heat in the western part of Europe, and that this company is bringing lots of corruption cases in its luggage.”

This brings the conversation back to building intersectional alliances, as Ben Chekroun emphasizes that Israeli and other complicit companies are following a well-established blueprint: they might be moving operations to avoid pressures, but they are also profiting from weaker labor protections in Eastern Europe. On top of that, governments in Eastern Europe are not losing time to emulate crackdowns on movements observed in the West. “They can also feel that movements are growing, and so we have seen recently in Poland, in Czechia, in Hungary and in Romania, a wave of repression and arrests of activists.”

Opportunities that rise amidst darkness

The system is shaken and becoming more aggressive in response, Ben Chekroun says. “It will react even more violently—that’s part of the cycle. So it’s about being able to see the opportunities that rise amidst darkness. And I think Palestinians have [been doing that]. It’s been their reality for the last 78 years: how to find opportunities and how to find ways to fuel the resistance against this system and use what’s happening for fueling popular resistance.”

“This brings us back to the discussion of how Palestine will free us all: because it’s at the center of so many oppression systems, because it’s connecting so many justice struggles. It’s become the symbol of how to shut down fascism, how to shut down capitalism, patriarchy, and all of those systems that are oppressing everyone.”

In September 2024, intermittent rainfall plunged the northern Algerian Sahara into an almost apocalyptic atmosphere. In just forty-eight hours, more rain fell than the average of an entire year and a half.

Roads collapsed, bridges were destroyed, several neighborhoods around Béchar were temporarily isolated, and families had to be evacuated. The army was deployed for assistance. Satellite images later revealed a striking phenomenon: lakes had reappeared in desert basins that had remained dry for decades.

International media coverage mainly framed the event as a climatic anomaly—a “rare deluge in the Sahara,” according to NASA.

But in a region affected by more than a decade of drought, seeing these waters flow through the Oued Saoura and eventually reach lakes located hundreds of kilometers into the desert raised a fundamental question:

How can a region that prays for rain every season allow such a quantity of water to escape without being able to retain it?

These waters passed through palm groves along the wadi, eroded fragile soils, and accelerated land degradation. Even at a young age, this phenomenon already troubled me: where does all this water go every year when it crosses our region? And why does it become increasingly destructive?

My commitment to rainwater harvesting and hydrological restoration originates from this long-standing question.

In Saharan culture, we learn that water is the source of all life. Yet over decades of urbanization, we have sought to remove water as quickly as possible: channeling it, draining it, mixing it with wastewater, expelling it from living territories.

By trying to expel water from living landscapes, we have ended up turning its return into a threat.

Droughts then became established. And when water finally returns, it violently crosses landscapes that are no longer capable of absorbing it.

This is how I gradually came to understand that drought and flooding are not opposing phenomena, but two manifestations of the same hydrological imbalance. Ethics and economics alike should have led us to preserve these gifts of the sky and to ensure the reuse of wastewater.

But on the ground, in autumn 2024, another phenomenon appeared almost immediately.

The desert began to turn green.

Vegetation emerged in areas previously considered biologically dormant. Where soils were arid, water accumulated in basins and infiltrated the ground. Floods carried eroded soils rich in organic matter.

This event revealed not only climatic vulnerability, but also a latent ecological memory. The Sahara still bears the traces of ancient hydrological and vegetative equilibria, now largely forgotten.

From this observation, this document was born.

It argues that many water crises in arid regions are not solely due to a lack of rainfall. They also result from the degradation of territories’ capacity to retain water through soils, vegetation, windbreak green belts, palm groves, wetlands, and local hydrological and ecological systems.

Modern hydraulic systems are often designed to accelerate water: to drain it, channel it, centralize it, and evacuate it—sometimes even mixing it with wastewater—a sign of a profound rupture between modern urbanization and natural water cycles.

But when territories lose their organic capacity to slow down and infiltrate rainfall, when rapid drainage becomes the dominant planning principle, floods and droughts become two expressions of the same broken cycle.

The 2024 Saharan floods therefore raise a deeper question:

What if the resilience of arid regions depends above all on our ability to retain water within territories in order to allow life to emerge, reactivate soils, and transform the desert into a living environment?

This text explores this question through what I call “Fertile Hydrology”:
an approach inspired both by contemporary ecological sciences and ancient Saharan oasis systems, which regarded water not as a resource to be quickly evacuated, but as a force to be slowed, infiltrated, and cultivated.

The document proposes a set of simple, progressive, and context-adapted solutions for arid territories: rainwater retention measures, flood slowing systems, soil infiltration techniques, vegetation cover restoration, oasis rehabilitation, phytoremediation, small-scale water retention structures, and the regeneration of local water cycles.

It is a plea for a large-scale operation of soil hydration and territorial fertilization.

Water has long crossed landscapes without being able to rest within them.

To generate life, water must meet the soil, infiltrate it, remain long enough to nourish vegetation, recharge lands, and reactivate living cycles.

We must prepare territories capable of retaining water, rather than merely suffering or evacuating it.

This text is an attempt to rethink water, deserts, and resilience in an era where climate extremes are destabilizing arid regions worldwide. It proposes a plan ready for implementation.

The facts are there. The solutions exist.

This document does not propose a distant utopia, but an operational trajectory: a set of concrete, progressive, and immediately applicable measures to rehydrate soils and restore the fertility of arid territories.

The Sahara today constitutes a full-scale laboratory of the hydrological transformations that arid regions of the world will increasingly face.

The phenomena observed in the Saoura Valley and Saharan oases may foreshadow the transformations that many semi-arid regions across the world will have to confront.

The full report with images and references can be found here.

Being very much the all-American figure that he was, the passing of Ted Turner was bound to enliven the cliché machine with the usual, clotty descriptions: the philanthropist, the conservationist, the yachtsman, sporting proprietor, and twenty-four-hour news pioneer. “He thought big and lived large,” observed Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan with irritating triteness. “He was the original,” added former CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, barely an improvement. “He made us all strive for his vision of a better world.” No doubt the hagiographers will be kept busy with words of statuary on various aspects of his life in due course.

One contribution of his should not be spared a good beating. As the man behind the first 24-hour news network, he has much explaining to do. The time when news could be rationed to times of the day did, at least, concentrate the mind on those behind producing it. Care would be taken assembling the items that would be delivered by an almost affected hauteur on air. This all changed when the news about events became news about news. Turning news into a twenty-four-hour affair had the effect of treating virtually everything before the camera into something worth mentioning and reporting about. Nothing in this world of “Chicken Noodle News” could be too trivial anymore; every item, however tedious, deserved its place in Andy Warhol's span of 15-minute fame, from inane car chases to watching paint dry.

After Turner's launching of the Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980, events of varied relevance and proportion could receive the around-the-clock exposure live coverage offered. Relentless, even ghoulish footage beamed across the network of the Space Shuttle Challenger as it exploded 73 seconds after taking off in 1986. In 1987, an 18-month-old Jessica McClure gave voyeuristic delight to viewers over 58 hours of coverage after falling into a well in Midland, Texas. Eyes were glued to screens wondering if “Baby Jessica” might be rescued. The efforts of rescuers were also the subject of interest.

The argument about cable television news ever being factual is a moot point. CNN's coverage of the 1991 Gulf War only served to illustrate how subservient a news outlet could be to official narratives. The fact that news had become a continuous and unceasing affair merely concentrated the messages of the administration of President George H. W. Bush, turning CNN into an uncritical annex of the war. Douglas Kellner's The Persian Gulf TV War is a bracing account of this fact, a polemic against media complicity with establishment drip feed.

The US military establishment had certainly learnt chastening lessons from the Vietnam War, keeping the wandering media hacks on a short lead. The unsuspecting Wolf Blitzer, who continues to labour at the network with perennial sunniness, uncritically recalls in an interview with Poynter the cultivating roles played by the panjandrums of war. “The top Pentagon leadership—Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and other senior leaders were quickly reaching out to me—a newcomer and relatively junior reporter at the Pentagon—to brief me on the state of the war.”

This was no time for critical analysis from news reporters. A conduit, a medium, was what was needed, and a twenty-four-hour organ was there to oblige. The likes of Cheney and Powell, accordingly, “knew that everyone around the world was watching CNN and they wanted their analysis reported.” The icing of propaganda was complete with another realisation, not that Blitzer ever clicked. “It also became very evident to me the top Pentagon brass knew that Saddam Hussein's military leaders in Baghdad were watching CNN.”

That unceasing nature of the broadcasts also turned the journalists in the war news cycle into minor celebrities offering minor contributions. CNN's Bernard Shaw was hardly doing much in the way of investigative journalism bunkered in the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad as the bombs of Operation Desert Storm started falling. Limited as he was, he offered that line media watchers remember: “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.” The cable news coverage also served to exsanguinate the conflict, turning it into a simulation, a crude video game notoriously theorised by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard as La guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place).

With CNN as pioneer, snapping upstarts were bound to follow. By January 2002, Fox News had surpassed the network in the cable news ratings despite being available in 10 million fewer homes. The news in terms of substance had ceased to exist, its undertaker being Fox CEO and chairman Roger Ailes. In its place rose the ranting hysteric and jabbering pontificator, full of what might politely be called “views.”

With constant news coverage firmly in place, the time was ripe for a figure capable of seducing and even shaping it. Donald J. Trump did so with a sinister gusto, the first politician to become the news cycle. With tacit collusion, CNN and other cognate news networks fed and oxygenated the property tycoon's fickleness, the capriciousness, the rants. Every comment, however asinine or vapid or vulgar, warrants mention, analysis, a comb through by perfumed pundits eager to pursue a “fact check.” A Stockholm Syndrome of sorts developed between the network and the reality television star turned President.

With news as surfeit and saturation, the Turner legacy is one we could have done without. With its tendency to feed us stories that are thin, uneven and occasionally interesting in continuous fashion, the twenty-four-hour news beast is limping towards the Museum of Media Relics. The studied, rationed podcast and the conspiratorial slime of social media continue to usher it along its doomed way.

The recent emergence of former president and military pilot Rumen Radev as the winner of the snap election in Bulgaria signaled potential stabilization in parliamentary politics. The previous government collapsed at the end of 2025—after approximately 11 months—continuing a cycle of instability that has persisted for years. While for some Radev and his Progressive Bulgaria's majority bring hope this might change, it remains to be seen whether their program actually responds to the reasons behind the quick governmental turnover.

Radev stepped down from the presidency in January and announced he would run in the election, shortly after a wave of protests toppled the previous administration headed by the right-wing Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB). As researcher and political analyst Madlen Nikolova explains, the protests were sparked by the annual budget proposal but had much deeper roots. “The budget offered very little to working people, instead proposing increased social security contributions and some taxes,” she told Peoples Dispatch. “That angered many working class people: they could not tell where their money was going in the context of a constant stream of corruption scandals and schemes related to the then-ruling party and their cronies.”

While mainstream media was quick to classify the protests under the Gen Z mobilizations umbrella, Nikolova emphasizes they were actually based on social issues and cost of living concerns felt across generations. “In different surveys, people raised concerns rooted in the aspiration for a dignified old age for their parents, good education for their children, good healthcare, and so on,” she says. “None of them have seen progress in any of these spheres over the past 20-30 years.”

A potential moment of respite from corruption scandals

Governments led by GERB—supported by the populist There is Such A People and the Bulgarian Socialist Party at the time of the protests and enjoying the continuous backing of formations like the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS)—fed this frustration by building a fine-knit clientelistic network at different levels of administration and legislative power, leaving most people conscious that no options are available unless one joins them. That's why it was notable to see the protests expand outside Sofia, Nikolova points out. “Protesters were finally defying the clientelistic networks operated by GERB and DPS that were controlling public contracts and jobs in poorer regions,” she says. “This is more or less the context in which Radev's party rose and received such a surprising wave of support.”

Contrary to earlier predictions that saw Progressive Bulgaria winning the election but needing coalition partners to form a government, Radev's camp secured 131 of 240 seats on its own. This should give it ample room to implement its program, except for matters relating to promised judiciary reform—where additional parliamentary support will be required.

The first announcements of Radev's electoral success in the mainstream dubbed him as a pro-Russian and potential Eurosceptic: this took place around the same time it became apparent Viktor Orbán would leave the Hungarian premiership, with European institutions wary of new figures who could obstruct their planned support for the Ukraine war. Since the election in April, however, it seems Radev is unlikely to be this figure.

Instead, Nikolova points to a certain “ideological vagueness”—the benefit of not being associated with any of the parties that have let down people's hopes over the past decades—that has ushered in Radev's election. “His program does focus a lot on issues related to corruption and clientelist networks, but other than that, it offers boilerplate policies in all spheres, along with a strong focus on artificial intelligence (AI),” she says. “When it comes to working conditions, there's no mention of improving them really. The only mention of workers” rights and stable employment is exclusively in the context of military employment.”

In this regard, Progressive Bulgaria's planned measures mirror EU guidebooks, emphasizing fiscal discipline, budget constraints, and a limited distributive role for the state. “The party is definitely not a vehicle for social change, but maybe it will provide respite from all the endless corruption scandals and allow for room to talk about other strategic policies for the country,” Nikolova says. This remains a hope despite clear neoliberal tendencies, she adds, as Progressive Bulgaria still appears as a kind of broad-tent party, with some representatives using language based on solidarity, justice, and reform.

Moving beyond anti-corruption rhetoric?

“The key challenge is to move beyond the anti-corruption rhetoric, which would mean turning widespread frustration into a more coherent political project rooted in people's everyday material concerns,” Nikolova points out. With the Bulgarian Socialist Party out of parliament for the first time since the 1990s, its credibility among the people eroded after its participation in a number of right-wing governing coalitions, including the latest GERB-led administration, it is a big question who could assume the responsibility for building this political project.

Progressive Bulgaria is, again, unlikely to assume the role. While the prospect of tackling corruption and prioritizing national interests in foreign affairs could lead to improvements, caution is still in order, Nikolova says. “As Bulgaria is unlikely to become a major global player, it makes sense for its political class to focus more consistently on the concerns of its own voters. That said, those concerns don't necessarily align with what Radev's camp defines as the national interest.”

“I believe Progressive Bulgaria's stance mirrors wider developments across Europe. A growing push for military autonomy is unfolding, alongside deep internal tensions. Belgium has resisted seizing Russian assets despite pressures from the EU, but continues to cut welfare to fund its own rearmament. This has prompted large-scale mobilizations for over a year. In the context of economic slowdown in the country, Germany is struggling to justify moves towards conscription,” Nikolova adds. “It is obvious that Europe's emerging “austerity for war” agenda is already under strain from domestic pressures and fiscal constraints.”

“Radev and Progressive Bulgaria are already advocating for a significant increase in military spending up to 5% of GDP by 2035. The former president has called for—like many other European leaders—investments in unmanned aerial vehicles, drone defense systems, and the integration of AI technologies into the armed forces.”

“And he has explicitly emphasized closer interoperability between Bulgaria's armed forces and NATO's,” Nikolova concludes. “What will be left of NATO soon, I don't know. But he's definitely not questioning the logic of this military alliance—nor Bulgaria's place in it or in the EU.”

In the aftermath of the drone attack on the international airport in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, ravaged by a civil war now continuing in its fourth year, the government recalled its ambassador from Ethiopia on 5 May, accusing its neighbor of complicity.

The attack on 4 May came on the heels of the first international commercial flight landing at the airport since the civil war erupted in April 2023, when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) turned on its ruling partner, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).​

The airport had sustained heavy damage in the early days of the fighting. It was among the first locations the RSF attacked, before overrunning the SAF's military bases and much of Khartoum.​

The SAF-led government retreated from the capital and relocated to Port Sudan, which remained the seat of the administration for over two and a half years until January 2026, when the government announced its return to Khartoum. The SAF had recaptured the capital in May 2025.​

After the administration rehabilitated the airport, a domestic commercial passenger flight landed at Khartoum airport on 1 undefined, for the first time since the war began. This was followed by the landing of the first international flight on 28 undefined, carrying 300 Sudanese citizens returning from Kuwait. ​

Less than a week later, on 4 May, drones attacked the airport and military installations of the SAF in the Greater Khartoum region, destroying the semblance of peace and stability returning to Khartoum. In its twin city, Omdurman, a drone struck a civilian bus on 2 May, killing five people. ​

Addressing the media on 5 May, the SAF spokesperson Brigadier General Asim Abdelwahab said that the government has evidence showing that drones supplied by the UAE took off from Bahir Dar Airport in Ethiopia's Amhara region in four different attacks since 1 undefined. “What Ethiopia and the UAE have done is direct aggression against Sudan,” he insisted.​

Ethiopia, a pawn in UAE's “Port Imperialism”

Ethiopia has no strategic stake in the war in Sudan, maintains Mohammed Hassan, a historian and former Ethiopian diplomat. But the “UAE has bought over Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. It is using him as a pawn” in what he describes as the Emirates” “Port Imperialism,” seeking Africa's Red Sea and Indian Ocean coastline, with particular interest in a port on Sudan's Red Sea coast.

This strategic objective, among other considerations, informs its backing of the RSF, which, according to a UN fact-finding mission, committed “genocidal” atrocities late last year after overrunning El Fasher, which was the last major SAF holdout in Sudan's western region of Darfur. ​

Further west, there have already been confrontations across Sudan's border with Chad, a country also widely reported to be a conduit in the UAE's supply chain for the RSF.​

Now the war in Sudan also threatens to spill over its southeastern border, with Sudan's Foreign Minister Mohieddin Salem announcing the country's readiness to “enter into an open confrontation” with Ethiopia “if it becomes necessary.”​

While Ethiopia's foreign ministry has dismissed Sudan's accusation as “baseless,” multiple media investigations, as well as a recent satellite imagery analysis by the US-based Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, have shown evidence of Ethiopia's support for the RSF.​

Ethiopia has, in turn, accused Sudan of supporting armed groups in Ethiopia. However, PM Abiy Ahmed's government itself has a history of shifting alliances between a plethora of ethnically organized armed groups, pitting one against another in an attempt to balance state power.​

But Ahmed has lost this dangerous game he played, reducing himself to what some have called him “the mayor of Addis Ababa,” unable to step out of the capital, where armed groups reign over most of the remaining territory. Losing control domestically, Ahmed has made himself useful to the UAE, offering Ethiopian territory for the distant Gulf power to supply the RSF in neighboring Sudan, Hassan maintains.

In a ruthlessly crafted mission, with the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being close collaborators, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government has been laid low in west Bengal.

In a shameful first, 2.7 million voters came to be disenfranchised because their “logical discrepancies”—a device never used before by the Election commission—could not be sorted out for want of time.

What that unprecedented breach of the Constitutional injunction that “free and fair” elections cannot be said to have been held should even a single eligible voter be prevented from casting her vote does to the republic order is for residual democrats to ponder.

Imagine that the total difference of votes cast for the BJP and the TMC has been three million or so.

What might have happened had the 2.7 million disenfranchised voters actually voted is for all to wonder at, especially in view of the seats that were lost or won by less than 5,000 votes.

A travesty of an electoral process if there ever was one. The felling of the feisty Mamata Banerjee has brought cheer equally to the Left and the Right.

Long viewed as an unpedigreed usurper who had the temerity in 2011 to rudely bring down the 34-year-old Left front regime—high priests of theory and iron-clad organisation notwithstanding—by, of all things, mobilising the farming community against industrialists who were eyeing to acquire agricultural land to set up manufacturing units, leading to an episode of police firing on agitating peasantry with many fatalities resulting, the vandalism visited now on a statue of Lenin seems less consequential than the ignominious exit of Banerjee, the bete noir.

That Left cadres have for some time now been openly raising the slogan “pehle Ram, phir Vaam“ (first the party of Ram, meaning the BJP, then the Left) is not exactly the best kept secret of recent West Bengal politics.

Therefore, it is just as well that the Mamata party has been brought low, even if by the fascist right-wing that has played the communal card to the hilt.

Never before have Bengalis been so nakedly appeased as Hindus as during the campaign run by the Modi-Shah combine.

Even the memory of the constitutional/electoral imperative that no appeals may be made to religious or other identity markers during electoral campaigns has now been lost to the ECI, the executive, and wretchedly, vast sections of the populace as well.

Mamata, conversely, has been arraigned for molly-coddling Muslims in the name of secularism. Indeed, the erstwhile TMC leader-turned-BJP frontrunner, Suvendu Adhikari, has loudly let it be known that since only Hindus voted for him, there was no call on him to look after Muslim issues.

It is another matter that his party did not put up a single Muslim candidate.

The least attention to Muslim problems is no longer to be viewed as the State's constitutional duty to protect and preserve minority interest within a still-secular Constitution.

Indeed, the fall of West Bengal has brought nearer the coveted Sanatan goal of forging a unitary state—a sort of one-party right wing parallel to the Chinese model, dumping the principle of federalism as anathema to national unity.

Peninsular India still remains rather cussed in its refusal to prostrate to the unitary idea, but West Bengal has shown that the captive State now has all the wherewithal to breach the Deccan in time to come.

When that happens, the argument and the ground would have been made available to formally effect the transformation of the State into a majoritarian theocracy, with civilisational oneness crushing the decrepit pluralisms of old.

There remains though one thorn in the side of this unitary project—like it or not, the Indian National Congress.

The animal refuses to embrace the extinction so often pronounced and prophesied by the loud mouths of the right-wing.

Admirably, Rahul Gandhi, giving proof of a sagacious political vision, has rebuked the local unit of the party in West Bengal for their petty gloating over Mamata's defeat, rectifying some of his own negative observations of earlier days.

Conversely, Mamata has lost no time in acknowledging the gesture and reciprocating the sentiment, vowing to work to strengthen the INDIA bloc.

It is to be hoped by all those still wedded to the ideal of a pluralist, multiparty democracy, underpinned by staunchly independent institutions, that not only the TMC but other factions as well who once were part of the Indian National Congress, will see the pit that awaits Indian Constitutional democracy, and forge a new unity across the republic that may acquire the clout to build a people's movement forged not just on lung power but a deeply considered conjoint understanding of how a manifesto of a people's charter may be drawn up, and what organisational mechanisms may be conjointly put in place across northern and central India to unravel the depredations wrought by a rampaging right-wing that now needs the Constitution only as a facade till brought down.

The need for a thoroughly analysed and assimilated alternate politics

Mamata and all other elements of the secular-democratic INDIA bloc will need to understand that the return to a collectivity cannot just be a Pavlovian response to political adversity, but a thoroughly analysed and assimilated alternate politics that has the substance to defeat the right-wing in the hearts and minds of the common citizenry.

Now that both the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Left front in Kerala have also been ousted, it will be for them and parties like the Samajwadi party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar to hold hands with the Congress to salvage the centre before worrying about their pocket-boroughs as their chief myopic concerns.

There is a new youthful generation of Indians gone quite American in foregrounding money before emancipatory or enlightened social and political ideas.

In a grand capitalist phrase, the corporate media calls them the “aspirational class.” Surely, a nation's educational system cannot be geared merely to feeding the aspiration for higher incomes to the exclusion of ethical, altruistic orientations of mind.

And surely, our pride in civilisational values can hardly square with a world view which regards the acquisition of private wealth as the acme of developmental nationalism.

Corporate media houses and the ubiquitous barrage of commercial messages, made poisonously addictive through digital instruments, are now a formidable Epsteinian reality, and the task of retrieving an ethical state and polity are stupendously intractable.

And, contrary to propagated belief, religiosity, now ubiquitous to the nth degree, does not function as antidote to this phenomenon, but as a comforting affirmation of the value of lucre.

Not until the general elections of 2029 bring about a parivartan may the least rays of light grace the realm, preceded by an electoral victory in Uttar Pradesh towards which the INDIA bloc must strain every mental and physical sinew from this day on.

And if that does not happen, it may be curtains for the republic.

Students and teachers in over 60 localities across Italy striked on 7 May to protest education reforms presented by the Meloni government that seek to subordinate the education sector to industry interests and militarization. The measures include aligning technical and professional courses with employer needs and removing critical content from curricula, while keeping thousands of education workers in precarious positions.

The day of mobilization was preceded by an additional sectoral strike day on 6 May, and coincided with a new wave of dockworkers” protests for better working conditions and against arms transfers.

Collective actions were launched by student groups and trade unions, including Cambiare Rotta, OSA, and the education branch of grassroots union Unione Sindacale di Base (USB). “We're striking against the militarization of schools and society, against compulsory military service, against the reform of technical and vocational schools that hands over the education of the working class directly to corporations, against the new guidelines for high schools, and against a contract renewal that offers shameful wages while inflation rises, driven by the costs of wars we did not and do not want,” USB wrote ahead of the mobilization.

Planned changes to education programs reduce general education for students in technical and vocational schools, who are predominantly working-class. Instead, the reform focuses their education on employer priorities. Meanwhile, the government also intends to adapt programs in high schools (licei) by, among other things, minimizing content critical of European colonialism, imperialism, and other concepts that encourage critical thinking.

“High schools attended largely by the upper and middle class are instead geared toward fostering a sense of identity that is explicitly Eurocentric and nationalist,” USB added. “This is a school system that segregates, creates hierarchies, and trains the children of working-class families for precarious work while preparing the children of the elite for a “civilizing mission” that serves the rhetoric of war.”

Teachers” rights are also under threat, as the sector already relies on precarious workers after decades of underinvestment and cuts, with no stabilization in sight. Trade unions and student groups insist these setbacks are interconnected and prioritize the interests of the wealthy over popular demands, making it crucial for different groups in the sector to stand together.

“USB Scuola and OSA assert that their alliance is a strategic choice, not just a symbolic gesture,” wrote USB and OSA branches in Potenza. “The unity between school workers and students is the strength of our project, because the school system is rife with the same contradictions that plague society as a whole: exploitation, precariousness, militarization, and subordination to capital.”

As part of the international student campaign against conscription “We do not enlist,” the strike has also emphasized the importance of resisting the reintroduction of mandatory military service in the region—with actions in other countries, notably Germany, to follow on Friday, 8 May. “The entire public school system is being geared toward the logic of war that pervades the world: students are expected to acquire the skills and strategies needed to become an army for a labor market that's increasingly primed for war ,” USB added on 7 May.

“We must also strike against conscription: students are not cannon fodder, they are not a disposable workforce, and they are not merely resources to be exploited for the war economy.”

Finally, students and teachers emphasized the internationalist character of their struggle, linking wars fueled by the US globally with increased pressures on European students and workers. Cambiare Rotta and OSA highlighted the presence of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Italy as evidence of ongoing collaboration of European governments in illegal aggressions and war crimes.

“Marco Rubio's visit to Italy has sparked outrage among students, who are calling for his expulsion,” the groups said. “This international criminal, an accomplice to the genocide in Gaza and responsible for the war in the Middle East, is also a key figure in the campaign against Cuba, which is at risk of being attacked by the US. Hundreds of Cuban flags are waving in the squares, in support of and in defense of the Revolution, sovereignty, and peace in Cuba, the most solidary island in the world—and a cry of protest rises against Rubio.”

The waxwork figures of the Pentagon recently glowed with excitement with the announcement that the US military would be finally called upon to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. With the ceasefire between Teheran and Washington barely holding, President Donald Trump, as far as his attention span would allow, gingerly put Operation Epic Fury to the side in favour of a new mission. The effort to protect and navigate stranded and blocked vessels with US armed might would be dubbed Project Freedom.

As with everything in this cerebrally cloudy and foolish conflict, descriptions and names are untethered to a discernible reality. Was Project Freedom separate from the blockade of Iran? Yes, said certain administration officials. Was it an annex to Operation Epic Fury? No one quite knew.

Some details were provided on 5 May by the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, at a press briefing. “To be clear [Project Freedom] is separate and distinct from Operation Epic Fury. Project Freedom is defensive in nature, focused in scope and temporary in duration, with one mission: protecting innocent commercial shipping from Iranian aggression.” Iran had been “the clear aggressor” in the Strait, “harassing civilian vessels, threatening mariners from every nation indiscriminately and weaponizing a critical chokepoint for its own financial benefit, or at least trying to.” No mention, naturally, on why Iran had resorted to such measures in the first place.

Much of Hegseth's press address was a bleat, a complaint that the Iranians had simply not played by the rules, rules happily broken by the Trump administration and their Israeli allies when they felt necessary. Iran had attempted to “impose a tolling system,” using “a form of international extortion.” Project Freedom was the celebrated antidote. “Two US commercial ships, along with American destroyers, have already transited the strait, showing the lane is clear.”

The account untethered to reality followed on cue. Iran had been “embarrassed” by the successful transit of these two vessels. “They say they control the strait. They do not. So, American ships led the way, commercial and military shouldering the initial risk from the front, as Americans always do. And right now, hundreds more ships from nations around the world are lining up to transit.” With lavish immodesty, the Secretary noted that US Central Command (CENTCOM) had, along with partner nations, “been in active communication with hundreds of ships, shipping companies and insurers.” The US had provided a “direct gift” to the world in the form of “a powerful red, white and blue dome over the strait.”

With the counterfeit, grubby appeal of an advertiser's pitch, Hegseth went on to declare Project Freedom “humanitarian” in nature. “By breaking Iran's illegal stranglehold, we're protecting the lives and livelihoods of sailors from dozens of countries, securing global energy routes and preventing shortages that hit the world's poorest people the hardest.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine was also on hand to explain that CENTCOM had “established an enhanced security area on the southern side of the strait that is now protected by US land, naval and air assets to help defeat further Iranian aggression against commercial shipping.” He noted that Iranian fast boats and attack drones had been defeated. And how could they not be, given the presence of “more than 100 fighters, attack aircraft and other manned and unmanned aircraft, synchronized by the 82 Airborne Division” engaged in the air for 24 hours a day guarding “the enhanced security area and its approaches.”

With twenty-four hours, this elaborate, exaggerated, purplish vision of American deliverance from Iranian control to an anxious world had collapsed. On 6 May, Trump announced that he would be halting Project Freedom. Another round of proposals had been placed on the carousel of confusing diplomacy that might negate the need to resume bombing under Operation Epic Fury. Claiming that Pakistan and other specified countries had wished so, and given “the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement with the Representatives of Iran,” the blockade would remain in place but “Project Freedom (The Movement of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz) will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the Agreement can be finalized and signed.”

Later that day, Trump posted another message. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he declared on Truth Social, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran.” The inevitable, clownish threat followed: “If they don't agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”

The rapid demise of Project Freedom, more aborted than halted, had less to do with the emergence of a new desire to pursue negotiations so much as logistical inconvenience. The Gulf States, by and large, have not been impressed by the impulsive measure, given the potential resumption of hostilities. Tehran was always going to blunt US efforts to break the blockade of the Strait, a point demonstrated by attacks on the United Arab Emirates on 4 May that left an oil refinery in the eastern emirate of Fujairah ablaze and three Indian nationals wounded.

According to a report from NBC News, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was disgruntled enough by the American initiative in the Strait to inform Washington that it would deny the US military any use of the Prince Sultan Airbase to enforce the mission or permit US aircraft to use Saudi airspace to that end. This was despite a call taking place between Trump and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

An unnamed Saudi source was cited as saying that Saudi Arabia was “very supportive of the diplomatic efforts” led by Pakistan in aiding Iran and the US terminate the conflict, while a US official put it in simple terms as to why Project Freedom could only dissipate in impotence: “Because of geography, you need cooperation from regional partners to utilize their airspace along their borders.”

From the embers of the Trump administration's latest bungle emerged a one-page memorandum of understanding Washington has reportedly drawn up for further discussions with Tehran. It reportedly contains 14 points, covering, for instance, a declaration ending the war and the commencement of a 30-day period of negotiations on a detailed agreement that would see Iran reopen the Strait over that duration. This would be complemented by the lifting of the US naval blockade. Restrictions on Iran's nuclear program and the lifting of US sanctions also feature. Failing all that, the blockade or a resumption of military operations could take place. How chillingly close this is to those remarks of T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets: “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” This war was a beginning, and an end, we never needed.

In India, over 123 million people voted in the four states of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal (home to 290 million people) for their state assemblies. These are influential states: two in the south, one in the east, and one in the northeast. The next national parliamentary election is not scheduled until 2029, so these elections are not being seen as a bellwether for the central government. However, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government facing challenges due to fuel and food inflation, these elections have become an indicator of his popularity.

There are three immediate takeaways from this election: first, the level of state manipulation in the elections through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) certainly undermined faith in the electoral process, since it was seen to have enabled Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to win in West Bengal (population 100 million); second, the Gen-Z phenomenon, or the post-ideological politics wave, has entered India through the victory of film star Vijay's Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) in Tamil Nadu (population 77 million); third, with the defeat of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala (population 36 million), there will be no Communist-led government in any part of India for the first time in five decades.

Anti-incumbency wave?

The prevailing wisdom is that the sitting governments in the three states of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala lost their elections in an anti-incumbency wave. But, on closer examination, this might be too simplistic an argument. For instance, in Kerala, impressive work by the Communist-led LDF government led to the abolition of extreme poverty (the first Indian state to do so, and the first place outside China) and to the reduction of the infant mortality rate below five per 1000 live births (lower than in the United States). There was no reason for the electorate to deliver to the LDF its most severe defeat in recent times.

Modi's central government used the entire state machinery to tackle the three governments because their leaders had led confrontations against the national government of Modi on several issues. The core problem is that Modi wants to undermine India's federal system and centralize power in New Delhi. This has been strongly contested by non-BJP state governments, with the sharpest criticism coming from the states in southern India. The argument made by the southern political leaders is that since they are economically dynamic, their populations have not grown as much as populations in the north, which means that in any revision of the national electoral map, they will lose power in the central legislature. In these state elections, Modi targeted all three leaders (Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, M. K. Stalin of Tamil Nadu, and Pinarayi Vijayan of Kerala) and defeated them. Part of the use of the state apparatus was by the elimination of at least 2.7 million voters in West Bengal by the Election Commission of India, as well as the use of highly charged anti-Muslim language (notably of “infiltration” of migrants from Bangladesh into West Bengal) to polarize the electorate along religious lines. Both Banerjee and Stalin lost their own seats in the contest.

Gen-Z comes to India?

Chandrasekaran Joseph Vijay, a major star in Tamil films, launched his party (TVM) through his 85,000 fan clubs, drawing on a long tradition in Tamil Nadu of film stars, fan clubs, and the political establishment. But there was something novel about his campaign. His entire mood was driven by digital fluency, awareness of social issues that captivate online audiences, and impatience with traditional hierarchies. The excitement of his campaign, the unwillingness to accept party loyalties, and the care with which Vijay's team crafted political messages to induce cultural rather than political appeal stretched his popularity beyond the lines of the polarized electorate. Born in 1974, Vijay reached out to younger voters in a way that eclipsed the otherwise popular administration of Stalin (born 1953) and the other principal opponent, Edappadi Palaniswami (born 1954). But the Vijay phenomenon is strong on imagery and weak on policy or administrative competence. It carries forward the Gen-Z protests of Bangladesh, which resulted in a right-wing victory at the polls, and the Gen-Z protests of Nepal, which resulted in a government characterized by right-of-center incoherence.

In many ways, the victory of Modi's BJP in West Bengal felt as if it were equally formed by a Gen-Z wave, this time a type of cosplay Hindutva, Hindu power masked in casual anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric and in the vagueness of anti-politics. Social media platforms ran narratives that focused on young people, with themes such as anti-corruption and transparency sounding like anti-older people. It helped that the BJP's leader Suvendu Adhikari (born 1970) was younger than Banerjee (born 1955) and so positioned himself as the coming of a new generation. Beneath the smiles of the younger candidate and the social media glitz of the West Bengal BJP lies the disenfranchisement of voters, the religious bigotry of the campaigning, and the hoary nature of the BJP's Hindutva ideology—rooted as it is in an ancient fantasy created only a hundred years ago. Media-savvy personalities felled the need for real ideas to solve real problems. This is the essence of the Gen-Z phenomenon, much more than young people taking to the streets to demand this or that change.

Migrant voters

The BJP in West Bengal targeted migrants from Bangladesh, but that left a bad taste in the mouth of other migrants. According to the 2011 Census, there were 456 million workers in India who migrated within the country—more than one third of the population. But most of these workers cannot vote in the states where they work because voting is tied to a permanent home address, and most migrants remain registered in their native villages. As a result, workers must return home to vote, which is both expensive and inconvenient and therefore results in low voter turnout in their areas. One of the great limits of Indian democratic institutions is this casual disenfranchisement of migrant workers, mostly from the poorer states in India's north, who travel to the more dynamic states in India's south.

Interestingly, a candidate in the constituency of Domkal—Mostafizur “Rana” Rahaman of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPIM—addressed the migrant work issue head-on. A young and dynamic politician, Rana not only campaigned in his district but journeyed through India's south to galvanize migrant workers to go to the polls. Workers traveled back to Domkal to vote for Rana, and four hundred families with workers out of the state joined the CPIM before the elections. Rana's victory spells the end of the Left's drought in West Bengal, which had begun with the defeat of the Left Front government in 2011 after thirty-four years in power. His victory is that of the migrant worker in India, far less talked about than Gen-Z but perhaps with far more necessity of consideration.

Ethiopia's battle for unity is no longer being fought only in parliament chambers, military barracks, or the diplomatic salons of Addis Ababa. Increasingly, it is being waged in concert halls, diaspora festivals, coffee ceremonies, and in the trembling silence after a song that reminds millions of what has been lost.

For a nation of more than 120 million people, carrying the weight of one of Africa's oldest civilisations and one of its most painful contemporary fractures, the question of national cohesion has become existential. Ethiopia's ethnic federal system, introduced in the 1990s, promised recognition and autonomy for historically marginalised communities. Instead, it often hardened ethnicity into the country's most valuable political currency. Local grievances over land, language, and power became national fault lines, transforming difference into permanent political competition.

The 1995 Constitution emerged from a genuine attempt to answer historical exclusion. By recognising nations, nationalities, and peoples, it promised dignity to communities long pushed to the margins and introduced one of Africa's boldest experiments in ethnic federalism. Yet the same constitutional architecture that offered recognition also institutionalised identity as the primary language of politics. What began as a remedy for injustice often became a permanent negotiation of difference, where citizenship itself risked being filtered first through ethnicity. Innovation and burden arrived together, and Ethiopia still lives inside that unresolved tension.

What was designed as inclusion gradually became a machinery of suspicion. The consequences are visible in every direction. Tigray's devastating war left hundreds of thousands dead, according to international estimates from the United Nations and humanitarian agencies. Oromia remains tense. Amhara is unsettled. Youth unemployment continues to rise. Inflation has eaten into dignity as much as into wages. The World Bank estimates that more than a quarter of Ethiopians still live below the national poverty line, while conflict-driven displacement has made Ethiopia one of Africa's largest internal displacement crises.

Yet perhaps the deepest wound is psychological: the growing feeling among citizens that belonging itself has become conditional.

A country once held together by the emotional architecture of shared history now risks becoming a federation of strangers. Scholars have warned that the shift from a civic Ethiopian identity to narrow ethnonationalism creates a dangerous logic where communities no longer see neighbours, but competitors for survival. In such an atmosphere, patriotism becomes suspicious when wearing ceremonial clothes.

The memory of Adwa still breathes like a national heartbeat. In 1896, Ethiopians from Oromo, Amhara, Tigray, Gurage, Afar, and countless other communities marched not as separate identities, but as one people defending a shared future. Emperor Menelik II and Empress Taytu did not win Adwa alone; victory was carried by farmers, priests, women, elders, and warriors whose unity defeated colonial ambition. Adwa remains more than a military triumph—it is Ethiopia's clearest historical proof that diversity, when bound by common purpose, becomes strength rather than fracture.

Diplomacy in Ethiopia does not belong only to ministers and ambassadors. It also lives in the hands of musicians like Teddy Afro and Aster Aweke, in the voices of Orthodox priests and imams preaching restraint, in the authority of elders mediating local disputes, and in the diaspora leaders who carry national conversations abroad. These are the country's quiet negotiators—its Track II diplomats—working beyond formal state channels to preserve trust where institutions have failed. They translate pain into dialogue, and sometimes their legitimacy travels further than official policy ever can.

This is where Ethiopia's most unexpected diplomats have stepped forward: its musicians. Teddy Afro does not hold ministerial office, but few public figures command greater moral attention. His 2026 album Etorika, especially the widely discussed track “Das Tal,” landed not as entertainment but as national intervention. Within days, millions were listening across Ethiopia and throughout the diaspora, from Melbourne to Minneapolis, from London to Johannesburg. The BBC itself framed the release as a political event, noting how listeners interpreted the song as both a lament and a warning.

Its emotional force lies in its honesty. It speaks to exhaustion—to citizens tired of conflict, tired of elite games, tired of being told that division is destiny. For many, the song felt less like music and more like a national mirror.

That matters in foreign policy terms. Joseph Nye's famous concept of soft power—influence through attraction rather than coercion—often evokes Hollywood, K-pop, or Olympic ceremonies. But Ethiopia's soft power may be found in a voice cracking through an old speaker in a taxi in Addis Ababa. Music here is not decoration. It is a political infrastructure. Teddy Afro's music is “not merely music—it is memory, it is identity, it is a voice.” The diaspora understands this instinctively.

The Ethiopian diaspora is not simply an overseas population; it is an emotional republic stretching across continents. From remittances that sustain households to lobbying efforts in Washington, Brussels, and London, diaspora communities amplify Ethiopia's voice far beyond its borders. During moments of crisis, they become advocates, translators, defenders, and critics all at once. Their festivals, professional networks, academic circles, and digital campaigns function as a diplomatic force multiplier—extending Ethiopia's influence in ways embassies alone never could.

Nearly three million Ethiopians live abroad, carrying with them not only remittances but legitimacy. UNESCO has highlighted how diaspora festivals, cultural centres, and heritage programs serve as living diplomatic bridges between Ethiopia and host societies. In Washington, DC, Aster Aweke's concerts became communal reunions. In the United States, Meklit Hadero blends Ethio-jazz with Oromo, Amharic, Kambaata, and English, refusing the false choice between roots and modernity. Her work insists that multiplicity is not fragmentation; it is nationhood in its truest form.

This is not sentimental politics. It is a strategic necessity. Across Africa, governments are learning that cultural diplomacy often succeeds where official diplomacy fails. Ghana's “Year of Return” reconnected the state to the African diaspora with extraordinary economic and symbolic returns. Nigeria's Nollywood became an instrument of continental influence without ever needing a foreign ministry memo. Ethiopia, with its ancient heritage, Orthodox traditions, coffee diplomacy, and globally recognised musical identity, possesses equal—perhaps greater—potential.

Yet potential is not policy. Too often, governments seek the prestige of culture while fearing the freedom that culture demands. Artists are celebrated when they unify, but scrutinised when they criticise. That contradiction is dangerous. Suppressing musicians, journalists, and public intellectuals does not create stability; it merely pushes national grief underground, where it returns harder and louder.

Every nation carries scars, but peace depends on whether those scars become bridges or borders. Ethiopia's wars—whether remembered through Tigray, the Red Terror, imperial conquest, or local displacement—live not only in archives, but in family silence, songs, and inherited suspicion. Memory diplomacy is the difficult work of allowing grief to be spoken without letting it become permanent political inheritance. Nations do not heal by forgetting trauma; they heal by creating shared language around it, so remembrance becomes reconciliation rather than revenge.

The lesson from Ethiopia's recent history is brutally simple: censorship cannot manufacture trust. Nor can infrastructure alone. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is a magnificent national project, but concrete cannot replace the social contract. Roads connect territory; they do not automatically connect memory. Real unity requires something more difficult: the political courage to allow citizens to imagine themselves beyond ethnicity without asking them to erase it.

That means strengthening inclusive institutions such as the National Dialogue Commission, not as ceremonial theatre but as genuine negotiation. It means educational reform that teaches Oromo, Amhara, Somali, Sidama, and Tigrayan histories as chapters of one national story rather than competing national myths. It means cultural centres abroad that present Ethiopia not as a singular identity, but as a confident mosaic.

Ethiopia's internal cohesion matters far beyond its borders because it sits at the centre of one of the world's most contested strategic corridors. The Red Sea and the Horn of Africa have become arenas of competition among Gulf powers, the United States, China, Russia, Turkey, and regional neighbours, all drawn by trade routes, military access, and security interests. Though landlocked, Ethiopia remains the demographic and political anchor of this theatre. Instability in Addis Ababa echoes in Port Sudan, Mogadishu, Djibouti, and beyond, making national unity not only a domestic necessity but a regional imperative.

It also means the international community must stop viewing Ethiopia only through the language of crisis. The Horn of Africa has become a theatre of intense geopolitical competition—American, Chinese, Russian, Gulf, and regional rivalries all pressing into fragile domestic spaces. Ethiopia is too often treated as a strategic chessboard rather than a society trying to heal itself. External pressure without social understanding risks deepening the siege mentality already poisoning internal trust.

Global policymakers should recognise that Ethiopian stability will not come from security doctrine alone. It will come from legitimacy—and legitimacy is cultural before it is constitutional. The world has seen what happens when nations lose the emotional story that binds them. Bosnia, Lebanon, Sudan—fragmentation rarely begins with guns. It begins when people stop believing they belong to each other.

Ethiopia still has time to resist that fate. Its music says so. Its diaspora says so. Its history says so.

The nation that defeated colonial conquest and carried civilisational continuity across centuries should not surrender to the smaller prison of ethnic fatalism. Unity need not mean uniformity. It can mean something far more powerful: the decision to remain together despite pain.

Ethiopia's future will not be secured by force alone, because its deepest crisis is not only political—it is emotional, historical, and profoundly human. The road from Adwa to Addis Ababa, from coffee ceremonies to concert halls, from constitutional promises to diaspora voices, reveals the same truth: unity survives where people still believe they belong to one another. History gives that memory, culture keeps it alive, and diplomacy—formal and informal—turns it into a possibility. Ethiopia does not need to invent unity; it needs to remember it, protect it, and choose it again.

In the end, perhaps diplomacy is not always negotiated across polished tables. Sometimes it arrives in a melody. Sometimes it returns in memory. Sometimes a country remembers itself because a singer dares to remind it. And sometimes, that is where peace begins.

Israeli occupation authorities have extended the imprisonment of Global Sumud Flotilla activists Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila until Sunday, 10 May. “The court's decision to extend the detention of humanitarian activists abducted in international waters amounts to judicial validation of the state's lawlessness,” Adalah Center stated in response to the decision, adding it would move immediately towards an appeal and demand the unconditional release of both.

Abukeshek and Ávila are among over 170 activists illegally intercepted and abducted at sea by Israeli forces on the night of 29 to 30 April, as they sailed toward Gaza in an attempt to break the sea blockade imposed by the occupation. Since 30 April, both activists have been on hunger strike in protest of their imprisonment and inhumane treatment, Adalah emphasized.

The legal center added that the stated purpose of the two's imprisonment is further interrogation, although no formal charges have been filed yet. During previous hearings, the Israeli state attorney suggested Abukeshek and Ávila were suspected of collaboration with terrorist organizations and transfer of property for a terrorist organization, when they were in fact participating in a humanitarian flotilla—and were abducted outside the purview of Israeli domestic law, Adalah added.

“Both activists remain in total isolation, subjected to 24/7 high-intensity lighting in their cells and kept blindfolded whenever they are moved, including during medical examinations,” the lawyers warned. Since the abduction, the Global Sumud Flotilla and other organizations have raised the alarm over abuse and torture of sequestered activists: over 30 flotilla participants transferred by Israel to Greek authorities required medical attention for injuries inflicted by their abductors—including for protesting the transfer of Abukeshek and Ávila into Israeli custody.

Adalah warned Ávila had been dragged face-down on the ground and beaten so hard he passed out, while Abukeshek had been forced to lie tied-up and face-down on the ship used to transfer the activists. The abuse resulted in injuries visible in photographs taken during the first court hearing. “Thiago Ávila reported being subjected to repeated interrogations lasting up to eight hours,” the legal center added on Monday. “Interrogators have explicitly threatened him, stating he would either be “killed” or “spend 100 years in jail.’”

Through his lawyer, Ávila sent a letter to his daughter Teresa, outlining how the need to stop the genocide in Gaza pushed many parents and activists to take action. “Today over a million children are suffering a genocide, being starved to death, being amputated without anesthesia, and suffering from horrific, hateful ideas, despite not knowing what Zionism and Imperialism is,” he wrote. “I'm sure you miss me too much and all the mothers and fathers of Palestinian children also miss them so much and would give anything to live a life of love, happiness, and joy that every human being deserves, independently of race, religion, ethnicity or any other characteristic.”

“Your world will be safer because many parents decided to give everything to build this better world for you. I hope someday you understand that because I love you so much there was nothing more dangerous for you and for other children than living in a world that accepts genocide.”

US President Donald Trump announced that “Operation Epic Fury,” the military aggression launched against Iran on 28 February, “will be at an end” if Iran agrees to the terms proposed by his administration. In his Truth Social post on Wednesday, 6 May, he went on to threaten Iran with the resumption of war:

“If they don't agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”

Before this announcement, Trump had declared on Tuesday that the US is halting the so-called “Project Freedom.” He claimed “great progress” has been made during the talks to end the war with Iran. The decision came merely two days after launching the plan for the US navy to escort ships across the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran had warned any such move would be considered a violation of the ceasefire and would be dealt with accordingly.

US forces tried to break Iran's restrictions on Monday which led to small-scale clashes, with Iran firing on the US navy and some other commercial ships, forcing them to abandon the attempted transit.

In response, the US attacked two small Iranian civilian boats, killing at least five people.

A fire also broke out at the United Arab Emirates” Fujairah oil port, allegedly after its drones struck it, though Iran denied playing a role.

US proposals for a temporary deal

Various media organizations reported on Wednesday that the US has proposed a new one-page deal with Iran. The deal proposes Iran suspend its nuclear enrichment and both parties lift their restrictions on navigation in the Persian Gulf.

The US proposes to lift all sanctions against Iran and release billions of dollars of Iranian assets frozen in foreign accounts in return.

The deal can be modified based on the outcome of a final deal between the two parties at a later date. Iran is expected to reply to the proposal in the next 48 hours.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also declared the end of the military campaign.

“The operation is over. Epic Fury, as the president notified the Congress, we are done with that stage of it.”

However, it is speculated that the declaration is merely the Trump administration's attempt to sidestep Congressional authorization to continue any military hostility beyond 60 days.

Rubio also claimed that the US is now focusing its attempts on reopening the Strait of Hormuz for the free passage of commercial ships.

“Our preference is for these straits to be opened to the way they are supposed to be open, back to the way it was,” Rubio said.

An illegitimate war

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on Wednesday in Beijing. The two countries discussed regional and bilateral issues, including the fate of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

This is Araghchi's first visit to China since the beginning of the US-Israeli war in February.

During his meeting with Araghchi, Wang Yi reiterated his country's position that the US-Israeli war on Iran was illegal and underlined the need for a comprehensive ceasefire.

Wang also reiterated the Chinese position on Iran's nuclear program, underlining its support for Iran's right to have a peaceful nuclear program.

Araghchi's visit to China is crucial for various reasons. It is happening just days before Trump's scheduled visit to China.

Trump has been accusing China of supporting Iran's war efforts in various ways. He is expected to seek Chinese support in pressuring Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz.

The US has already demanded China should stop blocking UN initiatives in opening the Strait of Hormuz, even asking it to join its efforts to open the strait.

China has not responded to any US invitation for joint efforts to open the strait, while maintaining that the peculiar situation in the Persian Gulf was a result of the US-Israeli war on Iran and its fate depends on the end of the war.

Last week, China blocked, for the first time, US sanctions on five of its refineries for buying Iranian crude, asking its companies to not recognize, implement or comply with them.

Last month, China and Russia had also vetoed a resolution in the UN security council condemning the Iranian restrictions on navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and providing authorization for use of force against it.

The US introduced another similar resolution in the UN Security Council on Tuesday, demanding sanctions or even authorization to use force against Iran for failing to open the Strait of Hormuz.