IN January 2023, three important leaders from the United Nations (UN) visited Afghanistan. Amina Mohammed, deputy secretary-general, Sima Bahous, director of UN Women, and Khaled Khairi, assistant secretary-general for the UN’s peacekeeping operations, spent four days in the country, meeting Taliban leaders in Kabul and Kandahar. The UN officials ‘conveyed the alarm over the recent decree banning women for national and international non-governmental organisations, a move that undermines the work of numerous organisations helping millions of vulnerable Afghans’.

ON January 8, 2023, the Israeli government revoked the travel permit of Riyad al-Maliki. This act is not unusual, since Israel controls the movements of all Palestinians and routinely denies Palestinians the right to mobility, especially between the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the territories designated as Israel. The apartheid wall that snakes around the West Bank has a few gates where Palestinians stand in long, interminable queues where they experience terrible humiliation trying to go to work in Israel or trying to meet family members separated by the Israeli occupation.

IN late November, Boko Haram insurgents attacked a post at the Chad-Nigerian border, killing ten soldiers of Chad’s military. This attack is part of a broader jihadi push in the Lake Chad Basin, which comprises Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. Founded in 2002, Boko Haram (‘Western civilisation is forbidden’) fought the Nigerian military for control over the country’s north so that its preachers could establish a dar al-Islam in the region.

EACH year, the United States government passes a military budget that gets larger and larger, obscene really given the cost-of-living crisis that afflicts the world and the enormous challenges of climate change and environmental destruction. So many better ways to spend the massive social surplus extracted from living labour, and yet the US Congress – in an act of bipartisan enthusiasm – chose to allocate for the US military an annual amount of $858 billion, $45 billion more than requested by US President Joe Biden.

"Being Fidel's brother is a privilege," Raúl has said about the Commander-in-Chief, whose example has inspired him and the whole island.

As a child, he saw him as a promising young man. Energetic, as boys tend to be, Raúl would only receive criticism, but Fidel felt that there was something more in him, a future; that is why he took him under his protection, not to pamper him or applaud his hazing, but to see him grow as a good man.