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Diplomacy & Crisis News

How American Technology Helps China Persecute Its Christians

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 15:07
Technologies evolved from U.S. hardware and software are used to surveil and arrest China’s people, especially minorities and those with religious beliefs.

Le combat des marchands de journaux

Le Monde Diplomatique - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 15:06
Avant de se matérialiser par d'immenses fermes de serveurs, la diffusion de l'information reposait sur une constellation de marchands de journaux. Malgré des conditions de travail souvent éreintantes et le déclin des publications imprimées, les kiosquiers, libraires, maisons de la presse, (…) / , ,

How Past Choices Made Sumatra Flood-prone

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 14:46
Decades of damaging forest governance decisions degraded landscapes, turning heavy rain into catastrophe.

Understanding Trump’s Latest Tariff Threat Against South Korea

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 14:40
Looking for a hidden motive misses the point: Trump is extremely direct about expressing his displeasure. 

Fake Mental Hospitals Highlight China’s Elder Care Challenge

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 14:14
A scandal in which scores of seniors were sucked into an insurance scam shows how the current system is failing vulnerable people.

What Is Greenland’s Role in China’s Arctic Strategy?

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 13:51
Trump’s obsession with Greenland could actually create the result he is so afraid of: increasing China's Arctic presence.

India’s Defense Budget Jumps 15 Percent

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 12:11
Defense officials say that the inflated spending reflects a new focus on military modernization triggered by Operation Sindoor.

Things to Watch in Bangladesh’s Upcoming Election

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 11:42
Violence remains one of the most serious concerns in the run-up to and during the polls.

Plebiscite or Refounding? The Constitutional Limits of the Referendum in Bangladesh

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 11:18
By passing this referendum, Bangladesh is likely to set another precedent for disregarding the Constitution in times of crisis.

The Plastic Pollution Crisis

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 07:53
The evidence is now overwhelming, current levels of plastic production and consumption are unsustainable.

Thailand Prepares to Vote in High-stakes General Election

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 06:24
No party is expected to win the 251-seat majority needed to rule alone.

The Real Risks of the Saudi-UAE Feud

Foreign Affairs - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 06:00
Regional rivalry will raise tensions far beyond the Gulf.

US Government Removes Embargo on Arms Sales to Cambodia

TheDiplomat - Fri, 06/02/2026 - 01:15
The Department of Commerce's ruling is the latest sign of the positive momentum in relations between Phnom Penh and Washington.

Documentaire | La vente secrète des juifs de Roumanie

Courrier des Balkans - Thu, 05/02/2026 - 23:59

Le documentaire La vente secrète des juifs de Roumanie du réalisateur Pierre Goetschel sera projeté dans le cadre du Luchon Festival.
Le 5 février 2026 à 16 heures.
Renseignements : https://luchon-festival.com

- Agenda / ,

Indonesia’s $80 Billion Wake-Up Call

TheDiplomat - Thu, 05/02/2026 - 22:51
The country's recent stock crash was a clear warning that the world will no longer invest in a market dominated by a handful of powerful families.

Changer le régime ou le vassaliser

Le Monde Diplomatique - Thu, 05/02/2026 - 17:26
Que les États-Unis renversent un gouvernement étranger n'est pas chose nouvelle. Mais tous les coups de force américains n'obéissent pas au même modèle. Le « regime change » néoconservateur, pratiqué dans les années Bush, ne semble pas avoir les faveurs de l'actuel locataire de la Maison (…) / , , ,

In Kyrgyzstan, US Special Envoy Gor Brushes Aside Visa Restrictions, Promotes Business

TheDiplomat - Thu, 05/02/2026 - 16:40
U.S. policy toward Central Asia has narrowed to the economic realm.

DRAFT OPINION on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Establishing Horizon Europe, the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, for the period 2028-2034 laying down its rules for participation and...

DRAFT OPINION on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Establishing Horizon Europe, the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, for the period 2028-2034 laying down its rules for participation and dissemination, and repealing Regulation (EU) 2021/695
Committee on Security and Defence
Costas Mavrides

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

‘Delulu Is THE Solulu’: How the Radical Left Went Silent on Iran

Foreign Policy Blogs - Thu, 05/02/2026 - 16:16

While the radical left busied itself karening through public life—thugging around with cliquish silent stares to shame non-socialist conformity, in ways uncomfortably reminiscent of Khamenei-style intimidation—the streets of Iran have been on fire since December 28, 2025. What erupted across all 31 provinces marked the largest wave of democratic movement since the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in custody after being arrested by Iran’s hijab police for allegedly violating compulsory hijab laws.

Unlike earlier protests that flared unevenly and then dissipated in fragments, this movement distinguished itself through scale, coordination, and synchronized leadership. Bazaar merchants shuttered their shops in lockstep with nationwide strikes by students and industrial workers. Ethnic minorities mobilized along the periphery, while the global Iranian diaspora amplified the uprising abroad in real time, transforming local dissent into a transnational political moment.

This mobilization was not spontaneous rage but the product of a deep structural rupture. Decades of economic stagnation and systemic corruption had pushed Iranian society beyond the threshold of endurance, leaving virtually no space for reform within the existing order. By December 2025, inflation had surged past 52.6 percent, while the rial had collapsed by more than 80 percent year over year—material conditions that rendered political quietude untenable.

The Islamic Republic, in the end, responded to this democratic challenge as it always has: by killing its own people. Iran International estimates that by mid-January 2026, between 12,000 and 20,000 protesters had been killed in a brutal nationwide crackdown—a textbook campaign of mass repression—alongside roughly 330,000 injuries and more than 18,000 arrests.

When the Radical Left’s Romanticism Turns into a Political Theatre

Despite their cadre-bred reflex to wrap grand social causes in revolutionary garb—and their near-compulsive urge to politicize them across Facebook timelines—the radical left in the West has remained conspicuously silent on the bloodshed in Iran. This silence, bitterly felt across the Iranian diaspora over the past one month, has been so complete as to verge on erasure, especially when contrasted with the movement’s vocal and relentless solidarity campaigns for Gaza.

Angered by this identity-denying deafened hush, Iranian-American human-rights activist Masih Alinejad, for instance, has directly criticized the radical left’s posture as “beyond hypocrisy”: not an accidental omission, but an ideological silence that, in her words, exposes how readily parts of the radical left “sympathize with… Islamic terrorists” so long as their violence is rhetorically framed as resistance to the West. Her charge is blunt: solidarity collapses the moment the victims refuse to conform to the approved script.

Even outlets hardly hostile to the left have noted the same void with a similar diagnosis. The Atlantic, in its essay The Silence of the Left on Iran, observes that Iranian exiles are “dismayed by the lack of sympathy from the American left,” largely because they are “viewed through the thick lens of (radical left anti-imperialist) ideology”—not as victims of repression, but as imagined agents of hostile power.

Right-wing publications have, unsurprisingly, been the most vocal in amplifying criticism of the radical left’s silence. In a January 13 article titled Why are the world’s loudest ‘human rights’ voices silent on Iran?, The Telegraph traces this silence to a deeper anti-Western intellectual lineage shaped by figures such as Michel Foucault and Edward Said. According to the piece, this tradition furnished the ideological scaffolding that enabled a revolution-romanticizing Western radical left to form what it calls a “strange union” with the ayatollah—reframing the Iranian Revolution not as the consolidation of theocracy, but as an anti-imperialist struggle for liberation.

The outcome of that union, however, was not the emancipation the radical left had imagined, but betrayal. As the article recounts, it produced systematic purges, mass executions, and the criminalization of secular allies throughout the 1980s. Yet despite this historical reckoning, the same moral relativism that excused the ayatollah’s betrayal in that decade has remained deeply embedded in the “anti-Western brain rot that intellectually cripples our students today.” The radical left’s inherited truth, thus, is simple: “the (radical) left loves nothing more than a revolution—but only when it harms the West.”

This entrenched reflex, the article suggests, has not disappeared; it has merely reemerged as silence, shaping attitudes even within international institutions. The Telegraph points, for example, to UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, noting that he posted not a single image of the ongoing massacre in Iran, while readily uploading self-congratulatory video selfies of himself “bravely helping the Palestinians.”(To be clear, as of January 23, 2026, this silence among the radical left has persisted even while the UN Human Rights Council convened its 39th special session of the Human Rights Council on the deteriorating human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran—documenting mass protests, thousands killed in crackdowns, mass detentions, internet blackouts, and executions—and passed a resolution extending the Fact‑Finding Mission for two years. In this context, unless the UN explicitly bans radical-left activists—and anyone who supports or excuses criminal radical-left activities—from holding UN positions, and enforces strict political neutrality across the organization, it will continue to undermine its own moral authority.)

In a similar vein, The Spectator expresses its abhorrence of the radical left’s moral relativism on Iran. According to the magazine, the “ugly truth of the left’s creepy silence” lies in the fact that the “privileged keffiyeh classes of the West” have “fallen down the well of moral relativism,” becoming so intoxicated by the delusion that Islamic terrorists function as a bulwark, propping up the very bourgeois ideological white elephant they pretend not to see.

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