Tag: No Paywall

  • Reforming the World Bank

    In this brief published by the Center for Global Development, the authors discuss the calls for setting a reform agenda for the World Bank aimed at “enabling the institution to respond to today’s global development challenges.”

    “The reform agenda is being negotiated by representatives of World Bank shareholders and the institution’s management, which  put forward an evolution roadmap laying out key issues for discussion. Among these issues is whether the World Bank should take on a bigger and stronger role in addressing major global challenges. The United States has been a leading voice in the push for World Bank evolution […]. However, some shareholders have voiced concerns that the evolution agenda could detract from the bank’s core development mission or create financing trade-offs in the absence of significant new resources.”

    Read/download the full document here.

  • Free Downloads of Carl Menger's On the Origins of Money

    The Mises Institute provides (totally legal) free downloads of digital copies of Carl Menger’s book On the Origins of Money here.

    Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian school of economics.

    About the book: 

    “Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, and published in English in 1892, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace. Individuals decide what the most marketable good is for use as a medium of exchange. “Man himself is the beginning and the end of every economy,” Menger wrote, and so it is with deciding what is to be traded as money.”

    About the Mises Institute: 

    “The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, we seek a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. We encourage critical historical research, and stand against political correctness. The Institute serves students, academics, business leaders, and anyone seeking better understanding of the Austrian school of economics and libertarian political theory.” 

    Find the download link of the book here.

  • Einstein on Socialism

    In this essay, titled “Why Socialism?,” Albert Einstein expressed his thoughts on socialism. The essay “was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949). It was subsequently published in May 1998 to commemorate the first issue of MR‘s fiftieth year.” 

    Monthly Review is “an independent socialist magazine” that started publication in New York City in May 1949. 

    A short excerpt from the essay: 

    “Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before. 

    This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. 

    I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.” 

    Read the full essay here.

  • Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

    This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

    This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

    “There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

    The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

    Read the full article here.

  • Researchers Claim to Have Detected A Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background

    As widely reported, including in this piece on the Caltech website, “[s]cientists are reporting the first evidence that our Earth and the universe around us are awash in a background of spacetime undulations called gravitational waves.” 

    As the article reminds us, “[g]ravitational waves were first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1916.” The new evidence confirming their existence is a result of “15 years’ worth of observations made by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) Physics Frontier Center of more than 190 scientists from the United States and Canada.” 

    The article gives some background on NANOGrav: 

    “NANOGrav is an international collaboration dedicated to exploring the low-frequency gravitational-wave universe through radio pulsar timing. NANOGrav was founded in October 2007 and has grown to more than 190 members at more than 70 institutions. In 2015, it was designated a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center.”

    The methodology of this long-term study has been summarised in lay terms as follows: 

    “NANOGrav used data from radio telescopes—the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Very Large Array in New Mexico—to monitor 68 dead stars, called pulsars, in the sky. The pulsars acted like a network of buoys bobbing on a slow-rolling sea of gravitational waves.” 

    and 

    “When gravitational waves travel across the cosmos, they stretch and squeeze the fabric of spacetime very slightly. This stretching and squeezing can cause the distance between Earth and a given pulsar to minutely change, which results in delays or advances to the timing of the pulsars’ flashes of light. To search for the background hum of gravitational waves, the science team developed software programs to compare the timing of pairs of pulsars in their network. Gravitational waves will shift this timing to different degrees depending on how close the pulsars are on the sky […]” 

    Reportedly, a “series of papers detailing the new NANOGrav results have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Similarities Between India and China

    This piece in the Asian Labour Review compares the economic histories and current economic policies of India and China, arguing that the two countries are very much mirror images of each other. 

    Historically speaking, the author argues, the two countries have “more similarities than often acknowledged.” For instance: 

    “From inheriting largely rural, agrarian societies, to seeking similar goals for their population in terms of development and industrial modernisation or adoption of command planning strategies, there are striking patterns of convergence between India and China. 

    One prominent aspect in this comparison is the global neoliberal turn from the latter half of the 1980s and the restructuring of labour. 

    The advent of market reforms, along with the state’s retreat from an interventionist role, is predominant in labour relations for both India and China. Despite minor variations, the changing nature of the state-labour relations and the declining power of labour as a political subject is conspicuous across the spectrum.”

    The competition between the two countries is related to the larger global economic system: 

    “As transnational corporations outsourced their production, there has been tremendous competition among countries in the Global South to attract these investments. Governments in the Global South provide companies with infrastructure, resources and incentives to embed their production facilities in their territorial jurisdiction.”

    This is why we see (sometimes failed) “attempts to weaken labour protections for the sake of attracting transnational corporations” like trying “to extend working hours per day from 8 to 12.”

    The author makes this interesting observation about China: “‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ may continue to hold ground as a political-ideological euphemism, but capitalism is living reality in China’s economic transformation.” Recently, “[i]n response to rising labour costs, supply chain disruption and labour unrest, Apple and Foxconn have tried to diversify their manufacturing facilities to other geographies away from heavy dependency on China.” India is very much “in the race to parallel China, if not completely eclipse it,” with Indian policymakers “increasingly looking to copy the China playbook to shape the country’s growth and development.”

    The following lines perfectly sum up the central argument of the piece:

    “The nation-state narratives about India and China, centering on their geopolitical competition and itinerant border tensions, tend to emphasize differences and divergences more than convergences and parallels. There are admittedly vast differences in their political and social systems. But recognising points of convergence allows us to more fully explore their trajectories in all their complexities.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Including the Global South in Science Writing in the West

    In this piece for The Open Notebook, which “is widely regarded as the leading online source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science,” freelance science and technology journalist Karen Emslie talks about coming to the realisation that the Global South is under-represented or often completely absent from science writing and reporting: 

    “As a Scottish journalist reporting predominantly for publications in the United States, I have spent most of my career writing in English and interviewing expert sources in Europe and the U.S. That has been the easy path for me and many others. After all, most leading scientific journals are published in English; many studies’ corresponding authors are in the U.S. or Europe. And it generally takes less time for me and other English speakers to connect with sources in these countries than in others where we might run up against language and cultural barriers.”

    As she points out, this is an important issue because its consequences “aren’t just about a loss of narrative detail—they risk misportraying what science is, and whom it is done by.” 

    Realising that she “wasn’t entirely sure where to start looking for geographically diverse scientists to talk to,” Emslie sets out to remedy the situation. To that end, she shares “a few tips to leverage some of the tools and strategies you probably already use in cultivating sources.” 

    Furthermore, she has compiled a nonexhaustive yet growing “sampling of directories and other resources that can help reporters find expert sources around the world, with a particular focus on regions of the Global South.” 

    Read the full article and access the directory here.

  • On Female Friendships

    This piece on writingwomen.co talks about female friendships as “toolkits against patriarchal harms” and “meditative spaces for healing.” 

    A short extract: 

    “The most unusual characteristic about female friendships is that, unlike other bonds and relations, they don’t require an incubation period to develop. We as women connect instinctively at moments when making connections are the most difficult task otherwise- raising an eyebrow at each other after sensing the danger, holding hands while crossing roads, sending congratulatory messages after a scary presentation, offering sanitary napkins at the oddest moments; there is so much that women do for each other even without asking. The sense of doing it for the other and yet for ourselves, without any conditions and expectations has a deeply healing effect.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Saving the Public Sphere from the Onslaught of Digital Media

    In this piece, Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, discusses what some respected thinkers are saying about how to approach “the infopocalypse,” which Aviv Ovadya of Harvard has described as “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”

    The piece argues that “democracy cannot survive this failure of the marketplace of ideas because it disables the formation of any shared ground where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.”

    The main problem that the piece is trying to highlight is that “the digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere.” The author writes:

    “Without institutions and practices that can establish and preserve the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for democratic discourse.”

    His suggestion for creating such institutions and practices:

    “[…] new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Buying Russian Oil with Chinese Currency: Pakistan Flirts with De-dollarisation

    As widely reported, including in this report in The Cradle, “Pakistan paid for its first imports of discounted Russian crude oil in Chinese currency.”

    As the report goes on to point out, this is significant because:

    “Pakistan’s purchase takes advantage of new opportunities arising from the war between Russia and Ukraine. Due to western sanctions, Moscow lost its European markets for oil and natural gas exports and has instead redirected its sales toward other nations, notably India and China.

    Large quantities of oil paid for in non-US denominated currency and at reduced prices comes at a crucial time for Pakistan, which suffers from a balance of payments problem that risks the country defaulting on its external debt. The Pakistan central bank’s foreign exchange reserves are currently only sufficient to cover a month of controlled imports.”

    Read the full report here.

  • A Creative Commons Primer for Journalists

    Creative Commons, in partnership with Open Newswire, recently released this “practical primer on Creative Commons for journalism, and how to make the most of CC licenses.”

    According to the Open Newswire website:

    “Open Newswire is a consolidated feed of freely-republishable news articles written by professional journalists from around the world! Articles are written in over 90 languages and are available to be used under Creative Commons licenses or similar guidelines.”

    This guide is a useful tool because, as the Creative Commons post says, “some journalists may not be aware of the potential and ease of these tools.” Furthermore, the guide itself is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. 

    The complete “A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons” can be downloaded or read for free here.

  • Germany to Purchase Israel-made Air Defence System

    As multiple reports have pointed out, including this one in the European version of Politico, Germany is set to purchase the Israeli Arrow-3 air defence system. 

    The purchase is part of Germany’s efforts “to modernize its military under a €100 billion fund.” The anti-missile system has apparently “been in use in Israel since 2017 as part of its Iron Dome protection network.” 

    The cost of the procurement is not insignificant: 

    “Eventually, Germany’s expenditure on Arrow-3, which is designed to intercept ballistic missiles, is expected to reach €4 billion.”

    This is only one instance of “a splurge in defense spending across Europe following Russia’s war on Ukraine.” 

    Read the full Politico report here.

  • The Illusion of The Self: From Eastern Philosophy to Neuroscience

    This piece for Big Think by a neuropsychologist discusses how experimental science may be coming to the same conclusion that Eastern philosophy has provided for more than 2,500 years: “that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing.” 

    The author points out that in Western thought ““I” represents the idea of our individual self” and “[t]his I/ego is what we think of as our true selves, and this individual self is the experiencer and the controller of things like thoughts, feelings, and actions.” However, the author challenges us, “The next time there is an intrusive thought, consider the very fact that your being unable to stop it proves that there is no inner self that controls it.” 

    Eastern schools of thought like Buddhism, Taoism, and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, on the other hand, say “that this idea of “me” is a fiction, although a very convincing one” and that “the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind”: 

    “The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.” 

    The author points out that several studies over the years “have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning”:

    “The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.”

     Importantly, despite the progress in the field of brain mapping, the self has never been mapped as a function of the mind. The author argues: 

    “While various neuroscientists have made the claim that the self resides in this or that neural location, there is no real agreement among the scientific community about where to find it — not even whether it might be in the left or the right side of the brain. Perhaps the reason we can’t find the self in the brain is because it isn’t there.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The PPE Medpro Saga in the UK

    This report in the Byline Times summarises the PPE Medpro case. 

    The UK government had sued the company for £122m in 2022. But in the latest development: 

    “PPE Medro’s unaudited accounts, published last month for the year ended 31 March 2022, show just over £4m in current assets and just over £47,000 in cash. It reported no employees for the accounting period and none in 2021.”

    As the report points out: 

    “Byline Times was the first publication to reveal in September 2020 that PPE Medpro had won hundreds of millions in Government COVID contracts, just 44 days after being incorporated.” 

    During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had “won two contracts worth more than £200 million to supply personal protective equipment (PPE)” including one contract “for £122 million worth of sterilised gowns to the NHS.” The government has since claimed that the supplied gowns “did not comply with the specification in the contract”. 

    The concern is that the company “won contracts through the so-called ‘VIP lane’ of suppliers” with the Conservative peer Michelle Mone being “accused of lobbying Michael Gove and Lord Agnew at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to secure business for PPE Medpro.” Mone “has denied having any relationship with the company” and “PPE Medpro claims it delivered the contract to its terms and supplied equipment “fully in accordance” with the contracts.” 

    It is important to note that: 

    “The Byline Times has previously been the subject of legal threats from PPE Medpro.”

    Read the full report here.

  • The Importance of David Graeber's Work

    In this tribute to the late David Graeber, leftist magazine Red Pepper asked activists and academics “what David Graeber’s work meant to them.”

    The responses make for interesting reading. Like: 

    “As David wrote: ‘The difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified.’ Whereas debts are impersonal financial instruments, obligations trigger a chain of generosity: gifts and favours of similar, but not identical value, to be granted, not immediately, but at some appropriate time in the future, according to the needs of the recipient and resources of the obliged. Obligations bring us together; debts divide us. Systems of credit and debt have been used to manage our economic affairs for millennia. But David showed us that we are perhaps the first civilisation to orgy in the credit system without having in place the checks and balances that protect the poor from catastrophe.”

     and 

    “The English word ‘free’ derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’— unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends, because the enslaved cannot make commitments or promises. One of the earliest words for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means ‘return to mother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom. They would cancel all non-commercial debts and in some cases allow those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin.” 

    Read all the responses in full here.

  • Civil Society Urges EU to Invest in Non-commercial Digital Commons and Infrastructure

    More than forty civil society groups recently released this statement as a response to the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade, which was signed in December 2022. 

    The signatories of the statement “welcome the attention to sustainability and the need to avoid environmental harm” in the EU declaration and highlight “the growing recognition that there is a need for alternatives to the dominant commercial platforms and the extractive practices that dominate the online environment today.” 

    The central argument of the statement is this:

    “To create more socially-oriented and climate-friendly digital spaces and ensure the sovereignty of communities and our societies as a whole, Europe needs to invest in digital commons and public digital infrastructures.”

    “As a concrete first step” towards that end, the statement proposes that “the EU and its Member States should set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure fund” which “should be tasked with supporting the development and maintenance of digital public infrastructure that delivers public value by providing citizens and institutions with alternatives to commercial digital infrastructures.” 

    Read the full statement here.

  • Amnesty Releases Report on Taliban's War Crimes in Panjshir

    As this article reports, Amnesty International has published a new report that claims “[t]he Taliban have committed the war crime of collective punishment against civilians in Afghanistan’s Panjshir province.” 

    The area has a number of “members of the security forces of the former Afghan government” who “fled to Panjshir with equipment and arms, and joined the National Resistance Front (NRF).” 

    This has led to a retributive crackdown in the area by the Taliban resulting in “torture and unlawful killings,” “[m]ass arbitrary arrests and detention intended to intimidate local population,” and detainees being “subjected to extrajudicial executions.” 

    As the article states:

    “While many of the acts taken by Taliban forces individually constitute war crimes, the entirety of those acts – plus the additional arbitrary detentions and restrictions on the civilian population – also constitute the war crime of collective punishment.”

    Read the Amnesty International article covering the report here. Read the full original report here.

  • What is Black Sociology?

    This post on the blackfeminisms.com blog is a useful short introduction to Black sociology.

    According to the author: 

    “Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses.”

    The post gives a quick outline of the historical evolution of Black sociology, along with some of the key figures associated with it.

    Read the full blog post here.

  • The Long Road to Peace in Colombia

    This piece in The New Humanitarian, “the trusted news source on humanitarian crises,” by Bogotá-based journalist Joshua Collins is a useful resource in understanding the durability and effectiveness of long-term peace efforts. The writer reports on the aftermath of the 2016 peace deal in Colombia: 

    “Despite a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ending more than a half-century of civil war in 2016, conflict has been surging since in many rural areas of the country. 

    New armed groups have moved into the vacuum left behind when FARC fighters laid down their weapons and are now vying for territorial control with other older criminal organisations, with the lucrative production and smuggling of cocaine continuing to drive the violence.” 

    Even though the government of Gustavo Petro, famously the first leftist President of Colombia, “announced ceasefires with four of the five largest armed groups in Colombia,” the problem is that “none of the groups signed official written agreements.”

    Civil society organisations were reportedly “cautiously supportive of the ceasefire strategy.” While the government had claimed that the ceasefires “will allow for much-needed assistance to reach civilians in conflict zones,” humanitarian organisations raised questions about “whether they will actually improve conditions on the ground for civilians.” What makes matters worse is that many of the affected regions “are also effectively stateless as they’ve been neglected for decades – across administrations – by the national government in Bogotá.” 

    The scale of the problem is sobering: 

    “The UN estimates that 7.7 million Colombians are in need of some type of immediate humanitarian assistance, including hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered due to rising levels of conflict in recent years, in particular displacement and confinement.”

     The issues raised in the article take on more significance in light of recent reports that “[t]he administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced it is suspending a ceasefire agreement with a rebel group accused of killing four Indigenous people in a recent attack.” 

    Read the full article in The New Humanitarian here.

  • FAO Facilitates Japanese Aid to Boost Paddy Production in Sri Lanka

    According to this report, the Government of Japan, “through the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO),” is to provide $ 4.6 million “to strengthen the production capacity of smallholder paddy farmers in identified districts of the Dry and Intermediate Zones of Sri Lanka.” Reportedly, “[s]mallholder farmers are amongst the most vulnerable rural communities, predominantly cultivating rice for self-consumption.” 

    This comes in the wake of recent food shortages in Sri Lanka. According to the report: 

    “Together with its partners, FAO in Sri Lanka is addressing urgent food security needs, protecting the livelihoods of vulnerable farmers and fishers in the most affected districts while promoting agriculture, including in urban settings.”

    Read the full report here.

  • The Pangenome Project

    As this report in the MIT Technology Review states, “researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which combines the DNA of 47 diverse individuals—Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups—into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species.”

    The “pangenome,” as the new map is called, is the latest in a long line of human genome mapping projects. Reportedly, it “has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe.” 

    The significance of this project stems from the fact that it provides a more diversified map of the human genome than previous versions: 

    “People’s genomes are largely alike, but it’s the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren’t observable in conventional studies.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Making the Case for Reforming the IMF

    This article in Phenomenal World, “a publication focused on political economy,” juxtaposes “the rigidity and discipline enforced in IMF loan programs” with the “elasticity in liquidity and legal constraints” and “expedited financing” that is provided to financial institutions in the North Atlantic like Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse at times of crises.

    The author makes the case that “[s]urveying the contemporary landscape of sovereign debt and IMF lending programs reveals pervasive inequalities in the Bretton Woods system.” Such inequalities disproportionately impact low- and middle-income economies because “if countries fail to meet the structural reforms spelled out in the IMF’s program review, lending can come to a halt.”

    Busting a popular myth, the author writes that “[f]or many developing countries, the problem is not over-indebtedness per se” as “[m]ost governments pay back their external loans, often at the expense of imposing austerity on citizens.” Much like Credit Suisse, “the problem that most sovereigns face today is a liquidity constraint.” 

    Not only do “[p]rohibitively high interest rates make it difficult to access new financing and roll over existing loans” but high interest rates and debt servicing costs have led to central banks in some developing countries “selling part of their dollar stockpiles to buy—and thereby bolster—their own currencies.” Reportedly, the IMF does not seem to approve of this: 

    “Recently, IMF economists have criticized central banks that accumulate hard currency reserves to bypass interest rate hikes. But using foreign exchange reserves to purchase and thereby bolster the value of domestic currencies enables central banks to dampen some of the inflation. Given the inherent asymmetry in the international monetary system, hard currency war chests empower countries lower in the monetary hierarchy to cope with financial shocks.” 

    Between 2013 and now, the IMF’s own assessments have concluded that “IMF-imposed austerity mandates incur more damage to economic growth than previously calculated” and that “on average, fiscal consolidation does not lower debt-to-GDP ratios.” 

    The author makes a detailed argument that unless there are fundamental reforms in existing IMF lending policies and the Bretton Woods institutions are modernised, “the IMF’s future as the preferred lender for countries in crisis” is itself not secure: 

    “Much has changed since the initial drafting of the IMF Articles of Agreement in 1944. The Articles have been amended seven times, most recently in 2010. Shifts in the global financial system justify revisiting the Articles as a living document.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Authoritarianism and Neoliberal Education in Indonesia

    This article in Inside Indonesia discusses the “[l]egacies of Indonesia’s authoritarian past” in how “the Indonesian government continues to exert influence over how knowledge is consumed and produced within academic institutions.” 

    According to the author, “the state’s education policies have actively enforced an ideology of neoliberalism.” The author is concerned that “[a]cademics are shaping their ways of producing knowledge to conform with the expectations of a growing neoliberal authoritarian state.” This is concerning because: 

    “Knowledge that is produced within a neoliberal authoritarian environment deprives people of their economic and political rights, sustaining the state’s power. Controlling the people who produce knowledge is to control knowledge.”

    But the author draws hope from “the many examples of collective forms of education and knowledge production” and “a number of examples of collective resistance” to the Indonesian government’s authoritarian “marketisation of curriculum.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • How Dangerous is ISIS Today?

    This article published by Observer Research Foundation discusses how “[e]ven as ISIS as a group today is severely depleted, the threat perception remains constant.” 

    “[T]actically and strategically, ISIS is a mere shadow of what it was,” the author writes. After all, the terror group once “had control of the geography between Syria and Iraq, bigger than the landmass of the United Kingdom.” But “ideologically, it remains a potent force”: 

    “Pro-ISIS propaganda online remains in wide circulation, and other groups that align with it such as those in parts of Africa and Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) in Afghanistan continue to operate as local insurgencies and terror ecosystems using ISIS for its brand equity in an effort to attract attention, recruitment, and finance.” 

    The group’s ‘caliphate’ has long collapsed and “counterterror operations against ISIS in Syria, largely led by the US, have seen incredible success in the recent past.” Reportedly, “[t]he US has also moved away from an over-reliance on drone strikes as a mainstay of its counterterror thinking” and is instead using “special operations troops”: 

    “This method, while increasing risk of American fatalities on the ground exponentially, decreases the chances of civilian casualties, an issue that has repeatedly plagued and undermined US counter-terror operations in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan alike over the past two decades.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • An Index of Digital Archives of Radical Literature from Around the Globe

    Academic Evan Smith, who has “published widely on the topics of social movements, political extremism, national security, borders and free speech,” has put together a growing index of “radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised” on his WordPress blog. Most, if not all, of the included archives, are free to use, the blog claims.

    Browse this index of online collections and archives of radical literature from around the world here.

  • South Asia Open Archives Now Contain More Than 1 Million Pages

    As this piece in JSTOR Daily reports, the South Asia Open Archives “now offers more than one million pages of digitized primary source material.” 

    The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) website describes the archive as:

    “… a collaborative, open-access resource for research, teaching, and learning about South Asia. The member-driven collection includes historical and contemporary sources from and about the region in arts, humanities, social sciences, history of science, and other fields in English and other South Asian languages.”

    As the JSTOR Daily article points out, the archive was “launched in 2019 by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)” and since then “[m]ore than two dozen institutions have contributed to this ever-growing archive.” 

    The Centerfor Research Libraries “is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries” based in Chicago, Illinois. 

    Read the JSTOR Daily report on SAOA here. Browse the open-access South Asia Open Archives here.

  • Senegalese Parliament Refuses to Make Existing Anti-gay Laws Harsher

    As reported on Erasing 76 Crimes, ” [a] news site [that] focuses on the human toll of 68+ countries’ anti-LGBTI laws and the struggle to repeal them”:

    “On Friday, April 28, Senegal’s Parliament rejected a series of proposals, including a text that would toughen the criminalization of homosexuality, already punishable by one to five years in prison and a fine (Article 319 of the Penal Code, dating from 1966).”

    Even though the existing anti-LGBTI laws were not repealed, activists have welcomed this move considering the wave of anti-gay hysteria sweeping through some African countries.

    It is promising that the Senegalese “[p]arliament had already rejected a similar bill in January 2022” and that one legislator was quoted as saying “[w]e don’t need a law based on emotions that fills up our prisons.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Better Understanding Photosynthesis

    According to reports in multiple science publications, such as this one, “researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, together with collaborators from Uppsala University and Humboldt University and other institutions” have been able to shed more light on “how Photosystem II, a protein complex in plants, algae and cyanobacteria, harvests energy from sunlight and uses it to split water, producing the oxygen we breathe.” 

    As the report goes on to state:

    “Using SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser (SACLA) in Japan, they captured for the first time in atomic detail what happens in the final moments leading up to the release of breathable oxygen. The data reveal an intermediate reaction step that had not been observed before.

    The results, published today in Nature, shed light on how nature has optimized photosynthesis and are helping scientists develop artificial photosynthetic systems that mimic photosynthesis to harvest natural sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into hydrogen and carbon based-fuels.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Quantum Effects Demonstrated at Macroscopic Scale

    As this report states, physicists have been able to bring “the bizarre behavior of the quantum world to larger scales than ever before.” Various publications are calling it the world’s heaviest or largest Schrödinger’s cat. 

    The experiment can be summarised as: 

    “The trick, performed by vibrating 100 million billion atoms inside a sand-grain-sized sapphire crystal, created the world’s heaviest quantum superposition as the crystal simultaneously oscillated in two different directions.”

    This is important because: 

    “As most quantum effects typically decohere and disappear at macroscopic scales, Schrödinger’s analogy was meant to demonstrate the fundamental differences between our world and the world of the very small. Yet no hard limit exists between the two realms, enabling physicists to begin cajoling complex, near-macroscopic-scale objects into showing freaky quantum behavior.” 

    Of course, this could have far-reaching consequences for quantum technologies like quantum computing. 

    Read the full report here.

  • Buzzfeed News Shutting Down

    As this report summarises: 

    “Last week, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that BuzzFeed News is being shut down, leading to layoffs of about 15% of BuzzFeed staff. The layoffs will affect the company’s business, content, tech and admin teams as well as some staff in international markets. In an email to staff reprinted by CNBC, Peretti said they can no longer fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone operation.”

    Reportedly, the company’s news content will be shifted to Huffpost: 

    “The company’s sole news provider will now be HuffPost. BuzzFeed.com will continue its signature clickbait content, including listicles, quizzes, celebrity gossip and more.”

    Read a comprehensive report on the issue here.