Following Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli’s res­ig­na­tion in response to mass Gen Z-led protests, Nepal goes to the polls on 5 March. Some 19 mil­lion people — including 837,000 new voters — will choose from 120 reg­is­tered par­ties. With unem­ploy­ment and gov­er­nance fail­ures eclipsing tra­di­tional ide­o­log­ical debates, anti-cor­rup­tion and inclu­sion demands have dom­i­nated the cam­paign.

A geno­cide in Gaza that the world watched and allowed to happen. The Epstein files. Parliamentary scan­dals. Corruption so deep nobody can see the bottom. A war on Iran launched days after a peace deal was within reach. Most of us have lost faith in the people run­ning things. And that loss of faith is opening the door to some­thing we should all be watching closely: the steady transfer of deci­sion-making power to algo­rithms and AI sys­tems that are not neu­tral, not account­able, and not safe.

The eager obit­uary writers tended to announce that #MeToo had failed when­ever fur­ther inci­dents of high-pro­file sexual abuse were reported (though the very fact they were reported and in some cases suc­cess­fully pros­e­cuted may have been a result of these shifts). The single most impor­tant impact of #MeToo, I believe, is akin to what many envi­ron­mental vic­to­ries look like: nothing, in the abso­lute best sense of that word. Success for many envi­ron­mental cam­paigns is the river that was not dammed or pol­luted, the forest that was not cut down, the species that did not go extinct, the oil wells that were not dug, the coal that was not burned. Unfortunately, these results are invis­ible if you don’t know why the river is flowing freely, the birds are singing or the meadow near your home wasn’t paved over.

What other ill­ness gives the least atten­tion to the most affected?” asked Clare Norton, in her dev­as­tating account of her daughter Merryn Croft’s exis­tence before she died of Very Severe myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) in 2017 at the age of 21.

But to end poverty in all its forms every­where, studying this poverty line alone is not enough. Economists have tried offering alter­na­tives, but those can also fall short. For example, one widely used and much-cited frame­work, known as doughnut eco­nomics, aims to define “a safe and just space for humanity to thrive in” and assess whether people have what they need to live “a life of dig­nity and oppor­tu­nity.” The line that this frame­work pro­motes, how­ever, is just barely higher than the U.N.’s mea­sure of extreme poverty. It posits that just $3.10 per day gives people a chance to live such a life.
This claim is clearly at odds with our con­cep­tion of poverty. An income of $3.10 per day means just $93 per month, or $1,131 per year. Few people would think of them­selves as thriving on that income.
The misuse of low poverty lines as a cri­te­rion for what is suf­fi­cient for a good life dis­torts our per­cep­tion of people’s living con­di­tions. The reality is that we live in a world in which bil­lions are strug­gling to pay for the bare neces­si­ties: Three bil­lion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Three and a half bil­lion do not have access to san­i­ta­tion facil­i­ties. Most of them live on more than two or three dol­lars a day, but they are still living in deep mate­rial des­ti­tu­tion. To claim that they can live “a life of dig­nity and oppor­tu­nity” I find eth­i­cally repul­sive. It negates the misery of bil­lions.
To make global poverty’s true extent vis­ible, the U.N. should add a second, higher poverty line and give it equal impor­tance, set­ting it at a level that makes the poverty in every country vis­ible while matching our sense of what it means to be free from poverty.
Where would this poverty line be drawn? The existing inter­na­tional poverty line is based on an average of the poverty lines of sev­eral very poor coun­tries. The devel­op­ment economist Lant Pritchett has sug­gested fol­lowing the same logic to draw a higher inter­na­tional poverty line. I fol­lowed this sug­ges­tion, col­lecting nation­ally set poverty lines from a wide range of high-income coun­tries, as well as con­sid­ering pro­posals for uni­versal basic incomes, social secu­rity pay­ments and survey results about where poverty lines should be drawn.
Taking these ref­er­ences into account, my sug­ges­tion is to set a higher poverty line at $30 per day. Based on this cutoff, the map below shows where things stand today. In most coun­tries, almost everyone lives in poverty. And it also shows that, as we all know, even in the world’s richest coun­tries, a sub­stan­tial share of the pop­u­la­tion lives in poverty.

3.5 mil­lion Black Americans were pro­filed and cat­e­gorised as ‘Deterrence’ by Trump cam­paign – voters they wanted to stay home on elec­tion day

Immigrant women were forced to undergo unwanted hys­terec­tomies—­con­tin­uing in a dark legacy of forced ster­il­iza­tion by the U.S. gov­ern­ment.

We’ve counted the viral spread across peo­ples; now we need to count it within people.

These deaths were not merely a result of a lack of pro­fes­sion­alism. Some of the migrants who had been brought aboard the Ras Jadir were so afraid of their fate at the hands of the Libyans that they jumped back into the water to try to reach the European res­cuers. As can be seen in the footage, mem­bers of the Libyan Coast Guard beat the remaining migrants.
Sea-Watch’s crew was also attacked by the Libyan Coast Guard, who threat­ened them and threw hard objects at them to keep them away. This erup­tion of vio­lence was the result of a clash between the goals of rescue and inter­cep­tion, with the migrants caught in the middle des­per­ately strug­gling for their lives.
Apart from those who died during this chaos, more than 15 people had already drowned in the time spent waiting for any rescue vessel to appear.

“One inter­esting pat­tern in the bet­ting for this vote has been that whilst 75 per cent of the money staked has been for Remain, the majority of actual bets have been for Leave. That’s because the average bet stake for Remain is around £450, for Leave it’s just £70. Could that be sig­nif­i­cant?”

“Women with fem­i­nine fea­tures are more fer­tile”

These images, by pho­tog­ra­phers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color pho­tographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small towns. The color dig­ital pho­tographs, scans of color trans­paren­cies, show the places of Depression Era America – the industry, the homes, the land­marks and the land­scapes of a country emerging from the Great Depression and into World War II. All the cap­tion infor­ma­tion is taken from the orig­inal pho­tog­ra­phers and, where noted, was added to by the Library of Congress staff. (...)

Every day I get let­ters asking me to weigh in on the health care fracas. As if a red­neck writer armed with a key­board, a pack of smokes and all the mis­in­for­ma­tion and vit­riol avail­able on the Internet could con­tribute any­thing to the crap storm already in pro­gress.
Besides that, my unrea­soned but noisy take on this issue is often about as wel­come as a fart in a space­suit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes. (...)

The Mossad offered Swedish intel­li­gence to assas­si­nate a renowned left-wing jour­nalist in the 1970s, says a book just pub­lished in Sweden. The pro­posed target doubts this is true.

WE’VE gained so much in the dig­ital age. We get more enter­tain­ment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is cer­tainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free.
But we’ve lost some­thing as well: the for­tu­nate dis­covery of some­thing we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the dig­ital age is stamping out serendipity. (...)

When the Israelis’ con­tro­ver­sial twenty-two-day mil­i­tary cam­paign in Gaza ended, on January 18th, it also seemed to end the promising peace talks between Israel and Syria. The two coun­tries had been engaged for almost a year in nego­ti­a­tions through inter­me­di­aries in Istanbul. Many com­pli­cated tech­nical mat­ters had been resolved, and there were agree­ments in prin­ciple on the nor­mal­iza­tion of diplo­matic rela­tions. The con­sensus, as an ambas­sador now serving in Tel Aviv put it, was that the two sides had been “a lot closer than you might think.” (...)

Promises of Hollywood fame and for­tune per­suaded a young hacker to betray former asso­ci­ates in the BitTorrent scene to Tinseltown’s anti-piracy lobby, according to the hacker.
In an exclu­sive inter­view with Wired News, gun-for-hire hacker Robert Anderson tells for the first time how the Motion Picture Association of America promised him money and power if he pro­vided con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion on TorrentSpy, a pop­ular BitTorrent search site. (...)

Residents on a housing estate that will be demol­ished to make way for the Olympic vil­lage are seeking a court injunc­tion to stop tests being car­ried out to assess the dan­gers from radioac­tive waste dumped beneath the site. They are con­cerned that the pro­cess of testing the ground may dis­turb any radioac­tive mate­rial buried below and pose a health risk, and want testing stopped until they are rehoused this summer. (...)

24 hours after yes­terday’s grue­some attack, Fateh protests, com­plete with the hurling of insults against their rivals Hamas, have con­tinued unabated throughout Gaza’s streets.
And although Fateh run Palestine TV has also been careful to lay blame pre­ma­turely, Fateh sup­porters con­tinued to run amuck in the streets of Gaza, spraying bul­lets into the air during charged demon­stra­tions, blocking off major city roads with burning tyres, and pitching sol­i­darity tents in from of Mahmoud Abbas’s Gaza City home. (...)

The Shia, the largest com­mu­nity in Lebanon, are no longer rep­re­sented in the Lebanese gov­ern­ment. It could be just part of Lebanon’s bloody-minded pol­i­tics—or it could be a most dan­gerous moment in the his­tory of this tragic country.
At the weekend, the Hizbollah and the Amal move­ment walked out of the Lebanese body politic, split­ting apart the gentle, utterly false, bril­liantly con­ceived (by the French, of course) con­fes­sional system that binds this tor­tured nation together. There will be demon­stra­tions by Hizbollah to demand a gov­ern­ment of “national unity”, which means that Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, winner of the so-called “divine vic­tory” against Israel this summer, insists on another pro-Syrian admin­is­tra­tion in Lebanon. (...)

Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist with the World Bank, will warn that gov­ern­ments need to tackle the problem head-on by cut­ting emis­sions or face eco­nomic ruin. The find­ings, due to be (...)

IS IT pos­sible to force a whole people to submit to for­eign occu­pa­tion by starving it?
That is, cer­tainly, an inter­esting ques­tion. So inter­esting, indeed, that the gov­ern­ments of Israel and the United States, in close coop­er­a­tion with Europe, are now engaged in a rig­orous sci­en­tific exper­i­ment in order to obtain a defini­tive answer.
The lab­o­ra­tory for the exper­i­ment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the mil­lion and a quarter Palestinians living there. (...)

Canada’s open-ocean salmon farms are killing enor­mous num­bers of wild salmon, threat­ening the species, a new study shows.
Research pub­lished Monday found that sea lice — a fish par­a­site — from salmon farms along the British Columbia coast kill up to 95 per­cent of the wild juve­nile salmon as they head out to sea. (...)

Why, many formerly trusting fol­lowers of horo­scopes may be asking, was this colossal event not pre­saged in the stars? Or, failing that, in someone’s palm, crystal ball, tea leaves or chicken’s entrails? How, in the cir­cum­stances, are they to carry on believing? If an event such as this can go unpre­dicted by leading, pro­fes­sional astrologers, could it mean the whole edi­fice of astrology is an abject super­sti­tion? That the con­stel­la­tions are not, as pre­vi­ously adver­tised, heav­enly guides to life on Earth, but as indif­ferent, and as mean­ing­less as “a patch of curi­ously shaped damp on the bath­room ceiling” (as Richard Dawkins once, unfor­get­tably put it) ...

My imme­diate reac­tion to Marwan Barghouti’s reg­is­tra­tion as a can­di­date for the pres­i­dency of the Palestinian Authority was pos­i­tive.
First of all, I am always in favor of the underdog. And who could be more of an underdog than a pris­oner?
Second, I respect the man. I have met him at plan­ning meet­ings for joint peace actions. I have demon­strated for him in Tel-Aviv and been forcibly evicted from the court building, with a rightist lynch mob howling in the back­ground. (...)

The few people who have met Zarqawi and sur­vived say he has a strong per­son­ality. A prison doctor who knew him when he was in jail in Jordan said he could order his fol­lowers to do things “just by moving his eyes.”

A gender dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suit offers a glimpse inside the nation’s largest pri­vate employer and its treat­ment of women. It ain’t pretty.

I have been defending Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” from the crit­i­cism in main­stream and con­ser­va­tive cir­cles that the film is leftist pro­pa­ganda. Nothing could be fur­ther from the truth; there is very little left cri­tique in the movie. In fact, it’s hard to find any coherent cri­tique in the movie at all.
The sad truth is that “Fahrenheit 9/11” is a bad movie, but not for the rea­sons it is being attacked in the dom­i­nant cul­ture. It’s at times a racist movie. And the anal­ysis that under­lies the film’s main polit­ical points is either dan­ger­ously incom­plete or vir­tu­ally inco­herent.

From the moment the US author­i­ties refused to con­tem­plate a pris­oner exchange, Berg’s fate was sealed. Why did the Americans refuse a pris­oner exchange for Berg, when only yes­terday they were releasing hun­dreds of Iraqi pris­oners, many of them still in their orange jump suits and impris­oned without charge, after a visit by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? If these people are a secu­rity risk, surely they would not have been released, and if they are not secu­rity risks, why did the US author­i­ties not agree to a pris­oner exchange for the life of Berg and spare us this brutal car­nage?

Bartlett’s strug­gles only con­tinued when she exited prison. And her post-release adjust­ment to date is typ­ical of what inmates face as they try to “reenter” the society which has shunned them.
To begin, the tran­si­tion from prison to freedom is itself hard. Self-dis­ci­pline is a chal­lenge when for years you have not been able to make many deci­sions for your­self. Years of being told what to eat, when to eat, when to sleep, and when to wake up make it hard for many — including Bartlett — to chart their own course after they are released, taking charge of their own lives to get up, get dressed, and go to look for work on their own ini­tia­tive.

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
29 March 2004
The black flags of Muharram are draped over the front of the School of Arts, ban­ners of mourning erected by Shias at the vast campus of the University of Baghdad. The words praise Imam Hussein’s rev­o­lu­tion in the sev­enth cen­tury against the Omayads and they seek to draw all stu­dents - Christian as well as Sunni - into their tears of mar­tyrdom.
“Yes, yes for the Army of Mehdi,” says one. There are other, more polit­ical emo­tions dis­played; posters of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader assas­si­nated by Israel last Monday, wishing his soul a swift path to par­adise, con­dem­na­tion of American killing of civil­ians in the Sunni city of Fallujah.
Religion is now being estab­lished on the campus. Before the American inva­sion, about half the female stu­dents would wear the veil. Today, almost 75 per cent of the girls wear head scarves. Not nec­es­sarily a bad thing if this is their choice, but lec­turers are reporting an unhappy phe­nomenon: stu­dents who demand to leave class to take part in demon­stra­tions, sug­ges­tions that lec­turers are not suf­fi­ciently sym­pa­thetic to reli­gious stu­dents, claims that God deserves a large part in class. Another poster notes rue­fully: “When Danger is Past, God is Forgotten.”

Set that car­nage against the Madrid atrocity. Terrible though that act of ter­rorism was, it was small com­pared with the ter­rorism of the American-led “coali­tion”. Yes, ter­rorism. How strange it reads when it describes the actions of “our” gov­ern­ments. So sat­u­rated are we in the west in the dev­ilry of third world tyrants (most of them the prod­ucts of Western impe­ri­alism) that we have lost all sense of the enor­mous crime com­mitted in our name.
This is not rhetoric. In 1946, the judges who tried the German lead­er­ship at Nuremberg called the unpro­voked inva­sion of a sovereign country “the supreme inter­na­tional war crime”. That prin­ciple guided more than half a cen­tury of inter­na­tional law, until Bush and Blair and Howard tore it up, cov­ering their actions with a litany of lies. On February 4 last year, in a speech lasting less than an hour, John Howard referred more than 30 times to the “threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. He offered author­i­ta­tive detail: that Iraq’s “arsenal of chem­ical and bio­log­ical weapons [was] intact” and was a “mas­sive pro­gram”. All of this was false.

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed dis­in­for­ma­tion and bogus (...)

The Human Rights Campaign is sup­porting the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act, which is cur­rently cir­cu­lating in the House and Senate as H2426 S1252. This act would grant unmar­ried (...)

I must admit, how­ever, that one thing does induce mur­derous thoughts in my other­wise gentle head: Car alarms. Like a demon screeching from the deepest reaches of hell, these satanic devices (...)

Guerrillas in the Mist - Why the war in Iraq is nothing like The Battle of Algiers. By Christopher Hitchens MSN Home | My MSN | Hotmail | Shopping | Money | People & ChatWeb Search: Print | (...)

Howard Zinn and Thom Yorke have never done lunch, waved to each other along the red carpet, or even had a con­ver­sa­tion. But what if they did? We took the recent release of Howard Zinn's new book, (...)

As the ground cam­paign against Saddam Hussein fal­tered last week, with atten­u­ated supply lines and a lack of imme­diate rein­force­ments, there was anger in the Pentagon. Several senior war plan­ners (...)