Opinion

The applause in Washington when Israeli and US airstrikes killed Iran's senior political and military leaders was understandable. It was also unintentionally revealing. The premise behind decapitation strikes is not merely military. It is constitutional. It assumes that the leader is the regime, that authority...

By Melvin Durai During a recent public dance demonstration in China’s Shaanxi province, a humanoid robot performed kicks and twirls to the delight of adults and children. But things went awry when the robot strayed to the edge of the cordoned-off area. As it made...

By Jacques Attali In the 21st century, power no longer lies only in territory, capital, or technology. It lies in something far more elusive and finite: human attention. The jury verdict in a US civil suit, which found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately addicting...

Peter Singer & Savita Pawnday In 2005, the United Nations World Summit, attended by more than 170 heads of state and government, made a political commitment to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. But in endorsing the Responsibility to Protect, or...

Ajit Ranade Imagine spending the best years of your life from age 22 to 29, in a waiting room. You are educated, ambitious, and capable. But the job that you are waiting for has odds worse than a lottery. So, you study harder, make an...

At a critical time of fuel scarcity, the push to the nearly a decade-old India’s Regional Connectivity Scheme—UDAN (Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik)—is confronting a hard truth: aviation cannot be socially engineered into viability. Despite a renewed push involving tens of thousands of crores in...

The oil-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf are often described as petrostates. But the US-Israeli war with Iran has highlighted that they are also saltwater kingdoms, societies whose survival depends on desalination, or converting seawater into potable water on an industrial scale. Life in the...

By Jerzy Wójcik Contrary to the optimistic vision of stabilisation and economic development in the Middle East contained in the Trump administration’s US strategic documents, Israeli political elites appear to perceive the coming years as a period of systemic uncertainty. From their perspective, Israel is...

By James K Galbraith The National Securi ty Strategy that US President Donald Trump’s administration published last November was remarkable, far-reaching, and unlike any other NSS that has appeared since George H.W. Bush “kicked the Vietnam syndrome” in the early 1990s. In the cover letter...

By Dhurjati Mukherjee Lack of decency and morality is a political trend reiterated by leaders. The clamour raised by some states and the drama enacted, especially by West Bengal, regarding SIR bear testimony that they don’t want the mandatory revision. Is it because the parties...