Habib Siddiqui

Indian farmers have blocked a six-lane expressway outside New Delhi to mark the 100th day of protests against the deregulation of agriculture markets, to add pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Farmers young and old headed in cars, trucks and tractors to the highway for a five-hour roadblock on Saturday to oppose three farm laws enacted in September 2020 that they say will hurt them and destroy their livelihoods by opening up the agriculture sector to big private companies. Modi has called the laws much-needed reforms for the country’s vast and antiquated agriculture sector, and painted the protests as politically motivated. “The Modi government has turned this protest movement into an ego issue. They are unable to see the pain of the farmers,” Amarjeet Singh, a 68-year-old farmer from Punjab state, told Reuters news agency. “They have left us no option but to protest.” Their movement has gained international attention and support, including from celebrities such ...

On Monday, a criminal court in Paris handed down its verdict in Nicolas Sarkozy’s corruption trial. The former French president was sentenced to three years in jail – two of them suspended – for bribery and influence-peddling. This is a legal landmark for the French judicial system for two main reasons. First, no former president had been sentenced to an actual prison sentence since France’s collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain in 1945. (This said, Sarkozy’s one-year jail sentence will probably not be spent behind bars, but under house arrest with an electronic tag). The former president Jacques Chirac received a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for embezzling public funds when he was Paris mayor. And second, the French judicial system has long been seen as being deferential to the government of the day in sensitive political cases. This court decision definitely runs counter to this tradition. It took a lot of tenacity on the part of the Parquet National Financier (the judicial...

Ryan McMaken The threat of “nuclear proliferation” remains one of the great catch-all reasons—the other being “humanitarian” intervention—given for why the US regime and its allies ought to be given unlimited power to invade foreign states and impose sanctions at any given time. We saw this at work during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was said that nuclear weapons were among the “weapons of mass destruction” being developed or harbored by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Thus, it was “necessary” that the United States invade Iraq and enact regime change. It is now very clear, of course, that the Bush-Cheney administration was lying and there was no credible evidence that Iraq’s long-defunct nuclear program had been revived. But let’s say for the sake of argument that Iraq was well on its way to developing a nuclear weapon in early 2003. Would it have become “necessary” for the US to invade Iraq and install a de facto puppet regime that would agree to not develop nuclear weapon...

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is responsible for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the US administration has revealed in the summary of a long-awaited report detailing the American intelligence community's findings on the murder. The report will likely alter US policymakers' ties with Saudi Arabia and the crown prince, known as MBS, particularly. "We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi," the report, a summary of which was released on Friday, said. President Joe Biden has already suggested that he would forgo the young prince - the de facto ruler of the kingdom - and deal directly with the ageing King Salman. The report said US intelligence officials concluded that MBS ordered the assassination, based on his control of major decisions in the kingdom. 'Aides were unlikely to question Mohammad bin Salman's orders or undertake sens...

Dave DeCamp Satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press reveal a large construction project taking place at a secretive Israeli nuclear facility near the city of Dimona. The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center is home to laboratories that are used to obtain weapons-grade plutonium for Israel’s undeclared nuclear bombs. The pictures show what AP describes as a “dig about the size of a soccer field” near where the facility’s reactor is located. Israel did not respond to requests for a comment on the images. The images first surfaced last week, and Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif pointed out the hypocrisy in Western leaders who ignore Israel’s secretive nuclear weapons program while obsessively focusing on Iran’s civilian nuclear program that is subject to stringent inspections. Zarif described the Dimona facility as the region’s only “nuclear bomb factory.” Israeli officials are also constantly accusing Iran of having a secret nuclear weapons program when it is Israe...

Dave DeCamp Posted The US bombed targets in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border on Thursday. According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 22 members of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) were killed in the strikes, although the number is unconfirmed. An Iraqi militia source told Reuters that at least one person was killed in the bombing. The PMF is a group of mostly Shia Iraqi state-sponsored militias that formed in 2014 to fight ISIS. The US framed the bombing as “defensive,” blaming the groups they targeted for recent rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq, but no evidence has been presented to substantiate the claim. Earlier this month, rockets hit a US base in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, killing one contractor. “We’re confident that the target was being used by the same Shia militia that conducted the strikes,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said of Thursday’s bombing. The Pentagon described the targets as “infrastructure utilized by Irani...

Speaking recently on CNews, France’s equivalent of Fox News, the higher education minister launched an unprecedented attack on the whole French academic community. Frédérique Vidal argued that French academia is “gangrened by Islamo-gauchisme” or “Islamo-leftism”. The “Islamo-leftism” tag is today used uncritically by members of the government, large sections of the media and conservative academics. It is reminiscent of the anti-semitic “Judeo-Bolshevism” slur of the 1930s which blamed the spread of communism on Jews. In reality, “Islamo-leftism” is an elusive pseudo-concept which voluntarily confuses Islam – and Muslims – with Islamic extremism and points the finger at “left-wing academics” who allegedly collude with these nebulous Islamic entities. The notion, which is dismissed by the scientific community as unsound, was coined by the academic Pierre-André Taguieff in the early 2000s. The neologism was originally forged to point to the alleged political convergence between leftis...