Opinion

Global Impact: Gaza’s endless tragedy resonates worldwide

As of this writing, the death toll there, in the wake of four weeks of ferocious and at times seemingly gratuitous air strikes, has topped 10,000, many of them women and children, while an estimated 2,300, including 1,250 children, are known to be buried underneath the debris of destroyed buildings....

Opinion

How Gaza became Guernica, mirroring war’s havoc and horror

No, it’s not true, as psychotherapists and other clinicians would have us believe, that while contemplating mass suffering, especially mass suffering beyond all rational understanding such as that we are witnessing in Gaza, our empathy quotient decreases as the number of victims and the degree...

Opinion

Taliban to Afghan women: Your beauty salons gotta go

If you’re one of those people who noticed the many news reports about the intention of the Taliban to shut down all beauty salons in Afghanistan, as of Tuesday this week, and yawned, then you shouldn’t have. The story has implications that go beyond, well, the mere shutting down of beaut...

Opinion

Facing extinction: The time for climate action is now

The global calamity we call “climate change” was both up front and quite blunt in delivering its message to us in recent weeks, as record-breaking temperatures surged around the globe, driven by continued emissions of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, formed mainly by humans burning...

Opinion

The untold story of Mediterranean migration

In the Mediterranean Basin, which has been the cradle of civilization since 6000 BC, once horrific, unthinkable events -- events, that is, where human life is mocked and hounded into oblivion by our indifference -- have become commonplace in our time.Three weeks ago, in the early hours of Wednesday,...

Opinion

Musicals are America’s gift to the world

The impeccably crafted musical, whose polished score, Gothic love story and fantastical production have tugged at so many hearts, is no more.Phantom of the Opera, the venerable blockbuster which became the longest running show in the history of Broadway, bid us farewell two Sundays ago after the cas...

Opinion

Devastating quake in Turkey, Syria shows power of Nature’s fury

Whenever a human community, in whatever part of the world that community might be found, is left harrowed and beaten in the wake of a deadly natural disaster, our sense of common humanity kicks in and we rush to lend a helping hand, leaving our political, cultural and racial differences at the door....

Opinion

On visiting comets, collapsing stars and bumbling humans

Maybe there are indeed more things in heaven and earth, as Hamlet put it, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.On February 2, a comet, dubbed by astronomers C/2021 E2, will swing by our cosmic neighbourhood while hurtling through its seemingly endless elliptical orbit around the centre of the Solar ...

Opinion

Why ‘We Don’t Know Ourselves’ is the year’s best book

On we go, entering the stretch, mere days before we round the corner into 2023, time for this columnist to reveal his choice for the “Best of the Year” book, an emotionally punishing task for a bibliophile who finds himself torn having to pick among two, three or even four books that had...

Opinion

Making sense of one of Europe’s largest terror trials

It is a trial held strictly to mete out justice to defendants accused of committing crimes, but it is also a trial that will not fail to revive painful memories of a once heavyweight terrorist organisation that, during its heady reign, outraged our region and the world beyond with its wanton brutali...

Opinion

A sensational breakthrough for the hard-right in Italy

Europe held its breath as Italian voters went to the polls on Sunday in a national election whose end result saw Brothers of Italy, a party with neo-fascist roots, securing a sizeable victory in both houses of parliament and scooping as it did a larger share of the vote any other party, thus providi...

Opinion

Wheat: Going against the grain of human reason

Consider how wheat is as old as recorded history: This sublime grain, which has sustained the survival of human civilisation throughout the ages, would’ve been found, as a loaf of bread, on the dining table of a Mesopotamian family living in the Euphrates Valley 6,000 years ago as it would be ...

Opinion

Migration as a great metaphor of renewal

Europe’s waterways, now virtually migrants’ sole gateways to Europe, have become graveyards, where asylum seekers have drowned in alarmingly great numbers on their pitiful journeys of hope, in search of a sheltering refuge from the violence, persecution and poverty endemic in their own h...