Are urban slums the future?

Dhaka, in bustling Bangladesh, is a megacity growing at an incredible rate. And it’s part of a massive global shift: The earth’s countryside is emptying out, more quickly all the time. It took about 10,000 years for the human population to become 3 percent urban — a period extending roughly from the dawn of human…

Castro tells Ahmadinejad to respect the Jews

Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg – a man fond of war, Israel and conflict with Iran – is invited to Havana to meet and converse with Fidel Castro. There is much to digest but this is especially interesting: He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two…

Decency to the stranger hasn’t gone out of fashion

On the one hand, many of us are compassionate: A third of the world’s population has given money to charity in the past month, the largest study ever carried out into global social conscience reveals today. The “World Giving Index” used Gallup surveys of 195,000 people in 153 nations and asked people whether they had…

Come bow down to the Murdoch King

Who ya Daddy? They are unlikely to lay on a private jet to whisk him to the Med, but David Miliband has been given the seal of approval by the Murdoch empire after being invited to dinner next week by the media baron’s son James. Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, is also due…

“Warrior pundits” are always wrong so ignore them

TomDispatch reminds us of the faces we constantly see in our media, pontificating about the glories of war: Pentagon foreign policy is regularly seconded by a growing cadre of what might be called military intellectuals at think tanks scattered around Washington.…  Such figures, many of them qualifying as “warrior pundits” and “warrior journalists,” include: Michael…

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

Site by Common