When he died on August 30 at the age of 91, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, left an indelible legacy as a bold and courageous visionary who upended the stultifying political and economic status quo in his country. Through his innovative policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), he gradually dismantled […]
Last year, an outfit in Canada known as the Community Media Advocacy Center received $133,000 from the federal government to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting. The grant, approved by the Housing, Diversity and Inclusion ministry, was channelled to the Department of Canadian Heritage. The funds enabled the center to hire a senior consultant […]
Salman Rushdie, the preeminent novelist who had been living under the threat of an assassination since the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, is thankfully alive and recovering from a premeditated and frenzied attack on August 12. “The road to recovery has begun,” Andrew Wylie, his agent, said on August 14. “It will be […]
Twitter’s “terms of service” policy on “hateful conduct” forbids users to abuse others with “repeated slurs, tropes or other content” that “dehumanizes” or “degrades” them. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has chronically violated Twitter’s policy, yet his accounts in English and an assortment of other languages remain intact. Over the years, Khamenei has exploited Twitter […]
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ventured into dangerous terrain recently when he made the racially-charged argument that Europeans should not become “peoples of mixed race.” Speaking to members of Romania’s Hungarian minority in Transylvania, he lambasted the “flood” of non-European migrants being “forced” on Hungary and assured his listeners he sought to prevent it from […]
Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, needlessly waded into a cesspool of controversy recently when he glibly denied the historically-proven fact that the late Ukrainian nationalist icon, Stepan Bandera, was a “mass murderer of Poles and Jews.” During an interview on German television, Melnyk fancifully described Bandera as a “freedom fighter” who personified Ukraine’s struggle […]
Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American to be elected to the U.S. Congress, introduced a unique and controversial resolution in the House of Representatives on May 16. Its chance of passage is extremely slim, but its very appearance is unsettling and surely a sign of the times. Tlaib’s resolution broadly calls on the United States […]
Payton Gendron’s murderous rampage in Buffalo, New York, is yet another jolting and disturbing reminder of the deadly dangers of white supremacy in contemporary America. Gendron, an 18-year-old from a small town in central New York state, drove 300 kilometres to kill 10 shoppers at a Tops Friendly Market store on May 14. Eight of […]
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, having purchased the giant social media company Twitter for a cool $44 billion, has said he would be receptive to welcoming back former U.S. president Donald Trump to the platform. I can live with Trump’s reappearance on Twitter, his blatant and dangerous lies and half-truths about the last U.S. presidential election […]
With no end in sight to the nearly three-month-old war in Ukraine, the United States has doubled down on its commitment to help the Ukrainian armed forces beat back or defeat Russia. This has been an incremental process. Soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, he issued a […]