Iran's supreme leader has for the first time publicly acknowledged that thousands of people were killed during recent protests and blamed the US for the deaths.
A violent response to the unrest has claimed 3,090 lives, according to US-based Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), with some activist groups putting the death toll far higher. An internet blackout has made it extremely difficult to get clear information.
US President Donald Trump recently urged Iranian demonstrators to "keep protesting" and threatened military intervention if security forces kill them.
He gained 72% of the vote, the election commission announced, against 25% for his closest challenger Bobi Wine, who has condemned what he described as "fake results" and "ballot stuffing".
Wine has not provided any details and the authorities have not responded to his allegations, but African Union election observers said they saw "no evidence of ballot stuffing". Wine has called for non-violent protests.
Museveni, 81, first came to power as a rebel leader in 1986 but since then has won seven elections.
We've had some unusual and unexpected economic threats from President Trump over the past year, but I think it is safe to say this exceeds all of them, and takes us into both surreal and utterly dangerous territory.
If taken at face value, it is a form of economic war being levied by the White House on its closest allies.
That's because it targets allies at incredibly short notice and for a cause that essentially could break up Nato and the western alliance.
USA returns to the ICE Age
The killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and Donald Trump’s and Kristi Noem’s despicable lies about it, show that we’re all living at the whim of the administration’s masked, trigger-happy goons.
Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, has not been charged with murder. The incident remains under investigation by the FBI, with Minnesota state authorities, including Hennepin County prosecutor Mary Moriarty and Attorney General Keith Ellison, conducting a separate probe to assess potential homicide charges like murder or manslaughter. Federal officials, including the Trump administration, maintain Ross acted in self-defense, citing video evidence and his prior experiences. But the video raises questions about the justification.
On January 3, four days before the horrific killing, the Department of Homeland Security put out a press release. The headline bragged: "ICE Announces Historic 120% Manpower Increase, Thanks to Recruitment Campaign That Brought in 12,000 Officers and Agents."
If a nation’s diet requires ecological destruction to sustain it, can it really be called healthy?
There was a time when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have said no. Before he became the nation’s top health official, Kennedy built his career arguing that human health and environmental health were inseparable—that pollution in rivers became pollution in bodies, and that climate change itself was a public health emergency driven by industrial systems. His premise was simple: when the ecosystems that sustain life become unstable, human health becomes unstable too.
Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizing principle — there are such times in every human life, times when the entire system seems to cave in and curl up into a catatonia of anguish and confusion, difficult yet necessary for our growth.
Now that the Trump administration has gone ahead and captured Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro, we need to shift quickly from debating the wisdom of the intervention to thinking about how to deal with the aftermath. I don’t think that the legality of the American action should be our critical focus right now, for reasons I will get into at the end of this article. The real issue should be how to restore democracy to Venezuela, and how to create the conditions under which the 8 million people who have fled the country can return home.
Sticks and Stones
He’s heard of abusive relationships. But he never expected this. It could be a narrow squeak.
Alfie’s mood is black, bordering on suicidal. He’s never been treated with such disrespect. A less balanced person would have fled the country. Riddled with bitterness and memories of the empty wine bottles, visions of the post-it-notes on the fridge door, come rushing back. Dazed and confused, he fears for his sanity. He must get away from Nin and away from himself.So, he plans a journey of recovery by discovery, that will take him to new parts of Thailand.Will he see things clearer when makes his escape? How long will it take? Will he recover?
Mahler’s third is gigantic in every sense. His level of ambition for it was insane. He set out to do nothing less than capture the whole world: the creation of the earth, mountains and valleys, flora and fauna; all of music, high and low: the village band, church choir and Romantic orchestra; and all of humanity: joy and nostalgia and pain and terror, and, above all, love.
To achieve this, he decided to compose the longest symphony anyone had ever written. Instead of the conventional four movements, he wrote six. The entire piece takes more than ninety minutes to perform, which when he wrote it was about twice the length of a standard symphony and is still pretty much the longest in the repertoire. He also scored it for the largest ensemble anyone had ever put together. It requires a massive orchestra - there were ten double basses and two harps on stage last week, but every section needs to be supersized - plus a soprano soloist, and not one, but two choirs.
One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than not, when someone breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not.
If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, for in the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell
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Human Rights Burundi – Devastating Coups and the Root Causes
Political instability, coups, and conflict due to ethnic divisions between the Hutu and Tutsi populations are the root causes of Burundi human rights problems. Burundi, a small country in East Africa, has long faced big challenges to its approach to human rights.
STICKS & STONES FROM - ALFIE GOES TO THAILAND - SERIES
Sticks and Stones highlights the clear case of abuse as the victim prepares himself for a journey of recovery by discovery. The journey will either bury him in his misery or raise him up from the ashes to challenge himself again and build a new life.
All will be revealed in the final novel - A Million Roman Candles.
The Series is a story of human challenge, manipulation, rejection, abuse, and a search for peace.
THE KENRIGHT CHRONICLES - SERIES
The Kenright Chronicles is a psychological thriller series. Jack Kenright, a young investment banker gets involved in an international art swindle. which cripples his business and threatens his life and his family. He ends up a recluse, working for the FBI undercover and exposes massive corruption in the gambling world.
An eccentric young caretaker brings exuberant life to a smalltown French cemetery in this #1 international bestselling novel: "Enchanting" (Publishers Weekly).
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne, France. Traversing the grounds by unicycle, tending to her many gardens—and being present for the intimate, often humorous confidences of visitors—Violette's life follows the predictable rhythms of mourning. But then Violette's routine is disrupted by the arrival of Julien Sole, the local police chief.Julien has come to scatter the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that Julien's inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette's own complicated past."Melancholic and yet ebullient . . . An appealing indulgence in nature, food and drink, and, above all, friendships." —The Guardian, UK
t's two years after the Zero Day attacks, and cyber-security analyst Jeff Aiken is reaping the rewards for crippling Al-Qaida's assault on the computer infrastructure of the Western world.
His company is flourishing, and his relationship with former government agent Daryl Haugen has intensified since she became a part of his team.But the West is under its greatest threat yet. A revolutionary, invisible trojan that alters data without leaving a trace---more sophisticated than any virus seen before---has been identified, roiling international politics. Jeff and Daryl are summoned to root it out and discover its source. As the trojan penetrates Western intelligence, and the terrifying truth about its creator is revealed, Jeff and Daryl find themselves in a desperate race to reverse it as the fate of both East and West hangs in the balance.A thrilling suspense story and a sober warning from one of the world's leading experts on cyber-security, Trojan Horse exposes the already widespread use of international cyber-espionage as a powerful and dangerous weapon, and the lengths to which one man will go to stop it.
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