By Luke Coffey Last month, Afghanistan was hit by yet another major natural disaster. There was significant flooding in the northern provinces of Badakhshan, Baghlan, and Takhar. Estimates vary but it is thought that hundreds of people died and thousands were displaced from their homes. This latest catastrophe comes on the heels of a series of earthquakes in western parts of the country late last year that left at least 2,000 people dead and 150,000 in dire need of humanitarian aid. The effects of these disasters on Afghans are particularly bad because of the lack of good governance and eco ..read more

(UCA News) -- Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, said allowing Ukraine to use NATO weapons to attack military targets in Russia would lead to "an escalation that no one will be able to control anymore." "It is a truly disturbing prospect," the cardinal told reporters on May 30 in Milan, on the sidelines of a book presentation at the city's Ambrosian Library, according to Vatican News. The risk is real and should cause concern for "every person who cares about the fate of our world," he said. The cardinal's comments came in response to a growing number of countries considerin ..read more

By Joe Bukuras Paulette Harlow, an elderly woman with a debilitating medical condition was sentenced to 24 months in jail Friday after being convicted last November of participating in a pro-life blockade of a Washington, D.C. abortion clinic in 2020. Harlow of Kingston, Massachusetts, 75, was convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and of a civil rights conspiracy, a statute that prohibits the violation of someone’s rights guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution and law.  The FACE Act prohibits “violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive c ..read more

New images of Jupiter's volcano-studded moon Io, taken by the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona, offer the highest resolution of Io ever achieved with an Earth-based instrument. The observations were made possible by a new high-contrast optical imaging instrument, dubbed SHARK-VIS, and the telescope's adaptive optics system, which compensates for the blurring induced by atmospheric turbulence.  The images, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reveal surface features as small as 50 miles across, a spatial resolution that until now had been a ..read more

By Jayant Menon In many ways, Cambodia is Asia’s true miracle economy. It was only three decades ago when the Paris Peace Agreements were signed, ending the civil war that ensued following the ouster of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. In just over a generation, Cambodia has built up its economy and institutions almost from scratch, and transformed itself into a modern, thriving economy. Although many challenges remain, these achievements should be recognised and bode well for the future. Despite its tragic history, Cambodia has great aspirations. It aims to become an upper middle- i ..read more

40 years ago, a colourful, kaleidoscopic array of old second-hand vehicles — trucks, coaches, buses, even old military vehicles — began arriving in the fields opposite Stonehenge, the ancient stone sun temple on Salisbury Plain, for what would be the last huge, unlicensed, unpoliced, weeks-long temporary autonomous zone to root itself to the earth of ancient Albion. The vehicles that arrived were the vanguard of the eleventh annual Stonehenge Free Festival, a month-long anarchic happening, which began in June 1974 with a handful of playful mystics, but had grown significantly in its latter yea ..read more

By Avinash Chennuri and Kearrin Sims Demonstrating poverty reduction is a mainstay of political success in India. How much progress has been made, why poverty persists, what more needs to be done and what it means to be poor in modern India are hotly debated issues. According to the World Bank’s poverty headcount—which sets the poverty line for lower-middle-income countries at US$3.65 per day—poverty in India declined from 60.9 per cent in 2015 to 46.5 per cent in 2021. Over the same period, India’s National Institution for Transforming India (NITI-Aayog) reported that multidimensio ..read more

The results of the election to the South African parliament on Friday confirmed the widely-held belief that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) which spearheaded the country’s liberation from apartheid in 1993 and since dominated the political landscape like a banyan tree is in steep decline. ANC’s vote share plummeted from 57.5 percent in the 2019 election to around 40%.  ANC’s halcyon days are ending but then, all good things come to an end, finally. ANC could at least hang on for thirty years tapping into the legacy of the freedom struggle, which is not an easy t ..read more

By Andy Heil (RFE/RL) -- Mika Dzidziguri realized just a few years ago that people from outside the country could help Georgian society turn a corner. UNICEF and other foreign-based donors and aid organizations were working with her and other parents of children with Down syndrome to raise awareness, correct misconceptions about children with disabilities, and help find jobs for affected young people. Their work -- aided by international organizations that provided grants and support -- made up for the desperate lack of services in this Caucasus nation of around 3.7 million. Past re ..read more

By Wanjiru Njoya The BBC recently slapped a “trigger warning” on its popular 1969 series Civilisation, warning that viewers may deem the series objectionable as it presents Eurocentric perspectives. The series is now deemed to be “problematic” because it tells a “European story,” focusing on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is criticized by academics—for example, the classicist Mary Beard—for excluding other cultures and also for excluding women while showcasing the achievements of men in Greece, Rome, France, Italy, Germany, and Britain. This rejection of Eurocentricity by mo ..read more