https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-justice-iran-war-boosts-fears-rogue_n_69a38e00e4b0213c06763495

https://asiatimes.com/2026/03/a-strike-is-not-a-strategy-iran-will-prove-it/

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-iran-war-may-accelerate-fall-us-empire

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-justice-iran-war-boosts-fears-rogue_n_69a38e00e4b0213c06763495

https://theconversation.com/neither-preemptive-nor-legal-us-israeli-strikes-on-iran-have-blown-up-international-law-277173

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/khamenei-death-means-russia-china-183743224.html

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/2/iran_war_israel

https://www.newsclick.in/israel-us-bomb-iran-war-cannot-be-won

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/world-war-iii-is-about-to-begin/

https://www.geopoliticaleconomy.report/p/us-israel-war-iran-nuclear-weapons-imperialism

https://www.blackagendareport.com/standing-iran

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/02/ulqw-m02.html

https://thecradle.co/articles/comprehensive-hegemony-or-deterrence-balance-war-scenarios-after-the-assault-on-iran

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-new-york-times-paved-way-apocalyptic-war

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/iran-war-will-show-israel-and-us-why-colonial-era-ended

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/brics-missing-in-action-israel-war-permanent-member-iran-spirals

https://thecradle.co/articles/chinas-satellites-over-west-asia-a-silent-shield-for-iran

https://asiatimes.com/2026/03/khameneis-killing-is-neocolonialisms-final-gambit/

https://asiatimes.com/2026/03/modis-silence-on-iran-lost-indias-voice-in-the-middle-east/

https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/iran-israel-war-how-iran-is-outsmarting-us-israel-with-its-cheap-but-countless-missiles-11166995?pfrom=home-ndtv_topstories

by NADEEM F. PARACHA

A recent video showing a Quran that survived the devastating fire at Karachi’s Gul Plaza has reignited a centuries-old conversation. Throughout history, accounts of Bibles, Qurans or Buddhist sutras emerging unscathed from catastrophic floods and fires have been celebrated as Divine interventions. While these events offer profound spiritual solace, a closer look reveals a fascinating intersection of material physics and psychological bias.

From a physical standpoint, Dougal Drysdale, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, suggests that a hardbound book’s survival is often due to the ‘Closed Book Effect.’ When shut, a book functions as a dense, oxygen-starved block of cellulose. Because fire requires a steady flow of oxygen to consume fuel, the tightly packed pages resist ignition by preventing airflow from reaching the interior.

In the event of a flood, the surface tension of water against tightly pressed pages creates a natural barrier. This prevents deep seepage for a significant period, often leaving the heart of the book perfectly dry.

American psychologist Thomas Gilovich explains that when a sacred text survives a disaster, it often becomes more than just a book. It is elevated to a sacred relic. This transformation, according to Gilovich, can significantly redefine a community’s cultural path. In the aftermath of the 2011 Joplin tornado in Missouri, US, survivors and news outlets frequently highlighted the ‘miraculous’ discovery of intact Bibles among the rubble of flattened homes.

The survival of holy texts in the aftermath of natural catastrophes is often termed ‘Divine protection’, revealing the cultural and spiritual narratives people love to attach to such instances

While hardbound dictionaries and cookbooks likely survived in the same ruins due to their similar physical construction, these secular items were ignored by the media as mere debris. The surviving Bibles were immediately elevated from functional reading material to sacred relics, often being framed and displayed as symbols of Divine protection.

By focusing on these specific books, the media triggered a cognitive bias that led people to view the event through a supernatural lens rather than recognising the simple physical durability of bound paper.

British scholar Susan Whitfield, in her 2004 work The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith, details the discovery of the Mogao Caves in China. In that instance, the sealing of the Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra (868 CE) within a dry, walled-up chamber created a “natural vault” that protected the world’s oldest-dated printed book from the degrading effects of humidity and oxygen for nearly a millennium. The perception of such objects often shifts from the literary to the ‘miraculous’.

During World War I, pocket Bibles carried by soldiers occasionally stopped shrapnel due to the high density of their compressed paper. This led many soldiers to treat the Bibles as protective talismans.

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RAWADARI

Introduction

This report is about the human rights situation of the Muslim Ismaili Shia religious minority in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. The report covers restrictions and discrimination by the Taliban, the de-facto authorities (DFA), against the Ismaili community on their right to public and social participation and freedom of religion and worship, including limitations on worship, exercise of religious rituals and attempts at forced conversion. The report is based on 25 interviews with victims and survivors, their family members, civil society activists, and human rights defenders from the Ismaili community, both inside and outside Afghanistan. The primary objective of this report is to document prominent patterns of human rights violations against the Ismaili community in Afghanistan, raise public awareness, and support advocacy efforts to address the grievances experienced by this community.

The findings indicate that since returning to power, the Taliban have imposed widespread and discriminatory restrictions on the lives of this religious minority, resulting in systematic religious persecution. Over the past four years, Afghan Ismailis have been completely excluded from political, administrative, and social participation. Furthermore, the DFA have taken steps to weaken and suppress Ismaili religious and cultural identity, directly threatening their security, human dignity, and fundamental rights.

While discrimination against the Ismaili community is not new and has historical roots in Afghanistan, this research demonstrates that under the Taliban, these practices have become more organized and have expanded into every area of life. The restrictions and attempts to conversion affect all Ismailis, including Ismaili children who are being forcibly educated in Sunni, Taliban-run madrassas. Our findings indicate that in certain areas of Badakhshan, individuals who refused to transfer their children to Taliban religious schools (madrasas) faced fines, torture, death threats, and the burning of their homes and property.

Through public takfir (accusations of apostasy), intimidation, death threats, detention, and torture, the Taliban have coerced members of this community to abandon their faith and convert to Sunni sect of Islam.

Through public takfir (accusations of apostasy), intimidation, death threats, detention, and torture, the Taliban have coerced members of this community to abandon their faith and convert to Sunni sect of Islam.

The testimonies included in the report show a significant increase in the fear of expressing religious identity due to rising negative propaganda, takfir and hate speech. Other serious violations documented include:

• Strict restrictions on the freedom to perform religious rituals.
• Coercion to attend the religious ceremonies of other sects.
• Dismissal from government offices and deprivation of jobs due to religious identity.
• Prohibition of marriage and kinship ties with Ismaili families.
• Restrictions on educational centres and places of worship of Ismailis.
• Threats, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement, and the usurpation of Ismaili properties.

The findings illustrate that the Ismaili community is being subjected to systematic religious persecution that may be considered an instance of crimes against humanity. The report calls for prompt immediate, effective, and targeted measures from the de facto authorities and relevant international bodies to protect the existence and fundamental rights of this religious minority in Afghanistan.

Research Methodology

This research involved online interviews with 25 individuals (including five women), ranging from victims and their families to human rights defenders. The participants represent a wide geographical, social, and age diversity. Some were identified by the Rawadari research team, while others were introduced through a snowball method by the interviewees.

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Manto – Selected Short Stories (MSSS) translated by Aatish Taseer is a good collection covering some of the author’s famous stories. He wrote over 250 in his short life of 42 years, the last seven of which were spent in Lahore, after emigrating to Pakistan in Jan 1948.

Manto considered himself a Bombay writer, living and writing in close association with the city’s film industry for which he wrote stories and scripts. He had many close friends among film actors, and became a good friend of Ismat Chugtai, the woman short story writer for whom he had a high regard. She, like him, doubled as a screenplay writer for Bombay films. The amazing talent that the Bombay film industry drew at that time (and still draws) from all over India is the principal reason for its vitality.

Manto wrote about everything and was not afraid to describe the seamy side of life, which he saw as intertwined with the normal surface respectability on the outside. He was a wonderful writer of women characters for whom he had a special empathy; in his public life he upheld the tenet of equality for women. The translator, Aatish Taseer, who learned Urdu in order to translate Manto, makes a significant point about the culture in which Manto was at home:

India must now reclaim men like Manto. In Pakistan, Manto’s world, crowded with Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, would feel very foreign. It is only in India, still plural, still symmetrically Hindu, that it continues to have relevance. His eye could only have been an Indian eye, sensitive to surprising detail, compulsively aware of Indian plurality, sympathetic to people trapped in their circumstances, here pointing to a particular Hindu festival, there imitating Bombay street dialect.

Many have considered it a tragedy that Manto went to Pakistan after Partition. His wife Safia explains the perplexity at the time that led to his decision, in the biographical notes below. The real tragedy was that he went to a country that did not appreciate his gifts, that tormented him with obscenity charges (on one occasion the use of the word ‘breasts’ was cited as obscene). Magazine publishers in Lahore routinely paid him on the cheap with bootlegged liquor. For decades he was persona non grata, until on the centenary of his birth the Government of Pakistan decided it was time to bestow an honour, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz medal.

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AL JAZEERA

Disgruntled TikTok users are flocking to the platform which is promising a ‘transparent tech’ experience.

UpScrolled, a social media application created by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian entrepreneur Issam Hijazi, has surged in popularity across several countries, including the United States, as many users looked for an alternative to TikTok, which was formally taken over by US-backed investors and companies last week.

With Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle, who is a staunch supporter of Israel and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, acquiring a stake in TikTok’s US-based entity, social media users have expressed concerns about censorship of pro-Palestine posts on the popular app. TikTok’s global operation will still be run by its Chinese owner, ByteDance.

On Wednesday, TikTok permanently banned Emmy Award-winning journalist and Al Jazeera contributor from Gaza, Bisan Owda, sparking outrage and boycott calls from her supporters. The app has also been accused of content censorship around unprecedented ICE violence in the US.

UpScrolled, which was founded only a year ago, surprisingly climbed to the top spot of US app downloads this week, ranking number one in the “social networking” category of Apple’s App Store free apps by Wednesday. It was also among the top apps downloaded by Apple users in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

The app, meanwhile, is gaining thousands of new downloads as disgruntled TikTok users flock to the platform, pulled by its promise of “transparent tech”. The flood of new users momentarily crashed the platform’s servers over the weekend, UpScrolled reported.

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DEMOCRACY NOW

A new ProPublica investigation reveals new details about a sprawling ICE detention complex where families describe horrific conditions inside, such as being served contaminated food, with children and parents at times finding worms in their meals. Lights are reportedly left on for 24 hours a day. South Texas Family Residential Center, in the town of Dilley a few dozen miles from the southern border with Mexico, detains an estimated 3,500 people, more than half of them children. “I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here. … Once I go back to Honduras, a lot of dangerous things could happen to my mom and I,” a 14-year-old detained at Dilley, Ariana Velasquez, told ProPublica. There are also mounting reports of psychological abuse by guards, some of whom have allegedly threatened families with separation. “Many of the children who are now being sent there are being arrested by ICE around the country, and some of them, like Ariana, have been living [in the U.S.] for years,” says Mica Rosenberg, investigative reporter at ProPublica.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman.

“The Children of Dilley.” That’s the title of a new ProPublica investigation into the South Texas Family Residential Center, a sprawling ICE detention complex in the town of Dilley, a few dozen miles from the southern border with Mexico. It’s run by the private prison company CoreCivic. Dilley was first opened by the Obama administration in 2014.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by a ProPublica investigative reporter who went inside Dilley. But first we turn to the voices of two children held inside. This is a 9-year-old girl from Venezuela, Susej Fernández, speaking to ProPublica, describing what life is like for her at Dilley, where she’s been held for over 50 days.

SUSEJ FERNÁNDEZ:

hhHonestly, honestly, I don’t feel good, because there’s always, always an officer around, like, bothering me. I can’t go anywhere. And if I need to go to the bathroom, they won’t let me, because I have to go with my mom. So it’s annoying, and I just have to stay in my room.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is 14-year-old Ariana Velasquez reading a letter she wrote while detained at Dilley. She’s a high school student from Honduras who’s lived in the United States with her mom for seven years.

ARIANA VELASQUEZ: Hello. My name is Ariana V. I’m 14 years old, and I’m from Honduras. I’ve been detained for 45 days, and I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here. Every time I remind myself that once I go back to Honduras, a lot of dangerous things could happen to my mom and I. My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month. They’re very young, and you need both of your parents when you’re growing up. Since I got to this center, all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Those were the words of Ariana Velasquez, a 14-year-old girl from Honduras detained at Dilley.

We’re joined now by ProPublica investigative reporter Mica Rosenberg.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mica. Tell us more about Ariana’s story and the children detained at Dilley whom you spoke to.

MICA ROSENBERG: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

And I think one of the main takeaways here is that children who are at this center — in the past, the center had mainly been used to hold families who were recently crossing the border, many who — since the Obama administration, it’s been open, and families were coming there in the hopes of coming into the United States for the first time. But now there’s been a real shift, because border crossings have dropped to record lows, and many of the children who are now being sent there are being arrested by ICE around the country. And some of them, like Ariana, have been living here for years. You know, they speak perfect English, as you heard. They were detained sometimes in the middle of their school years. And in some cases, they’re now entrenched American lives. In the case of Ariana, she has two younger U.S. citizen brothers and — a brother and sister, a kindergartner and a toddler, who were not sent to the detention center. So, she was — she and her mother were separated from them.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Mica, about CoreCivic running Dilley? And talk about who is profiting financially from the locking up of children.

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Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian geopolitical journalist and author with decades of experience covering global power shifts, energy politics, and Eurasian integration. A seasoned foreign correspondent, he has reported from across Asia and Europe. He is a permanent columnist at The Cradle.

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by DEAN BAKER

Before I go further here, let me qualify everything I’m saying here with a warning: I have no crystal ball from which to give people investment advice. However, I do know logic and arithmetic, apparently unlike Donald Trump, so I can draw out some hypothetical situations, which is what I do below.

There has been much discussion, both here and around the world, of the possibility of a flight from the dollar. This has always been a serious risk since Donald Trump took office, but the risk increased enormously from his deranged rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. 

Virtually everyone who was not on Trump’s payroll acknowledged that the speech was both scary and incoherent. He made threats to our allies, boasted about imposing tariffs based on personal whims, and displayed an extraordinary ignorance of major world events. With Trump commanding extraordinary powers as president as a result of a docile Republican Congress and servile Supreme Court the United States does not look like a good place to park your money.

There have already been some prominent instances of pension funds pulling their holdings out of Treasury bonds and other US assets, but this is the less important part of the story. Most of the money at risk of leaving the United States is not held by public pension funds which may announce their decision to make a political point. 

Rather, most of the money at risk of fleeing is held by private corporations and banks, and wealthy individuals, who would pull their money out of the United States because they think that Donald Trump’s America is a bad investment. There are literally trillions of dollars that could be leaving.

To correct one of the silly things often said by people who should know better: No individual, bank, or corporation is asking where to park one, two, or three trillion dollars. This scenario is supposed to leave them paralyzed in any effort to leave dollar assets, because there is no good alternative country where they can park $4 trillion.

But that is not how the financial system works. The big investors are asking where they can park $10 billion, $50 billion, or $200 billion, and the answer is there are plenty of places where this sort of money can be placed with reasonable safety, including the European Union, Brazil, China, India, the United Kingdom and Canada. A flight from the dollar running into the trillions would be the result of tens of thousands of decisions to pull millions or billions of dollars out of dollar denominated assets.

I don’t know if we are seeing the beginning of this sort of flight, but if we are, we can say with some degree of confidence that the dollar, along with the US stock and bond markets, are headed lower. If that is the case, there is an obvious strategy for people in the United States: join the flight

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by KATHY KELLY

January 29, 2026, marks the second year since the Israeli military, using U.S. provisioned weapons, murdered Hind Rajab. Had she lived, this little Palestinian girl who liked to dress up as a princess would now be 7 ½ years old. An Israeli Defense Force unit fired a barrage of missiles at the car in which she and her relatives were fleeing from an Israeli military invasion of their neighborhood.

The family’s fatal ordeal began on January 29, 2024, in Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City, when Israeli forces ordered Hind’s family to evacuate from their home. Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set forth on foot. It was raining heavily, and Hind’s mother didn’t want her walking through the storm. Hind joined her aunt, uncle, and four cousins as they fled by car from invading Israeli forces. Hoping to reach a shelter at the Al Ahli hospital, Hind’s uncle sought advice from the Palestine Red Crescent office about what route would be safe to take. But before they could find refuge, the Israeli military fired on their car, immediately killing Hind’s aunt, uncle and three of her cousins.

Her surviving cousin, fifteen-year-old Layan, was able to re-connect, by phone, with relief workers at the Palestinian Red Crescent office. That conversation ended when Layan screamed that the tank was very near and the relief workers then heard an explosion. Hind watched in horror as Layan was killed. The relief workers called Hind. The utterly frightened girl answered, and they urged her to remain hidden in the car and try to be calm. Rescuers would come, they said. But it would be suicidal for relief workers to set forth without first coordinating with the Israeli military. It took several hours for the Israeli military to give clearance for two ambulance workers to travel the approved route, an eight-minute drive, in hopes of rescuing Hind.

Surrounded by the corpses of her family members, Hind pleaded with the Red Crescent workers to come soon. “I’m so scared,” she told them. “Please come.”

But when the rescuers were within 162 feet of the vehicle where Hind was trapped, Israeli tank fired missiles assassinated them.

Hind’s voice continues reaching people. Three award winning films have told her story, awakening consciences, worldwide, to Israel’s ongoing genocide.

Hind’s voice echoes, tragically, in the pleas of Palestinian children today who face torture and death at the hands of Israel’s genocidal policy makers and militarists. Palestinian children living in makeshift tents, soaked and chilled by winter storms, long for relief. Hind’s pure innocence speaks for them, also, these little ones who could never be mistaken for criminals or security threats, little ones who beg for warmth and protection. The vocabulary changes slightly: Please come. I’m so cold. Please come. I’m so sick.

Yet trucks laden with relief supplies remain blocked, at the border crossings, while children who are near death suffer under tortuous conditions.

More than 100 children are reported to have died in Gaza since the October 2025 ceasefire.

A January 26, 2026 UNICEF report notes that Israel’s relentless attacks have decimated water and sewage systems in Gaza. Since the onset of winter, heavy rainfall has caused unsafe water to flood densely populated areas where people are crowded into makeshift tents. The grounds become muddy, making hygiene nearly impossible as people sleep in saturated clothes and bedding. Storms have collapsed tents. Fuel for generators is scarce, and there has been no central electricity for over two years.

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