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Of all the speeches and political grandstanding at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26), the words of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador were the most profound and least hypocritical.

I woke up on November 3 this year to a cheerful email from Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The headline exclaimed, “Tuesday’s election shows that Socialism can win anywhere!”

What a paradox? King coal refuses to surrender even as more than 40 countries at the COP26 climate summit at Glasgow pledged to ‘quit coal’. Instead, global demand for coal and price have skyrocketed over the last several months with China, the US and India playing the spoilsport. The world climate may continue to worsen in the coming years as some of the world's biggest coal-dependent countries, including China, the US and India, did not sign up. More surprisingly, the heads of states of China and Russia, both fossil fuel guzzlers, chose to absent themselves from the climate summit. China is the world’s biggest producer-consumer of coal and CO2 emitter. Coal is branded as the single biggest contributor to climate change. In fact, coal accounts for 40 percent of the global energy production, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It continues to be a highly sought after energy source along with other fossil fuels in many parts of the world despite its being the worst offender of CO2 omissions.

The family of nations is balancing on the edge of an abyss as mushrooming religious and ethnic intolerance becomes the norm.

The march in Glasgow demanding justice for refugees and rejection of British Home Minister Priti Patel’s Nationality and Borders Bill could not be more timely. It highlights the fact that the refugee and climate crises are interwoven. It turns attention to the reality of Britain’s reactionary, racist immigration policy just as Tory ministers are trying to promote themselves as clean, green and internationalist using Cop26 as a global stage. And it reminds us of the ongoing struggle to change government policy of which the impressive left mobilisation in Glasgow over the past fortnight must form a part.

Former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki AlFaisal Al Saud must have gotten his tenses mixed up when he asserted in a recently published memoir that no one should underestimate the political importance of Muslims’ commitment to helping other Muslims.

There are many myths and misunderstandings about blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. This largely because many (not all) people who work in that space come at it either from a global capitalist mindset and/or some flavor of libertarian/anarchist mindset. They are seeking to politicize something which is after all just a technology, a tool, that can be used towards one set of ends or another. They want to monopolize this tool all for themselves.

Christopher Thorpe, 65, first toured the entire length of the Western Ghats as a 20-year-old backpacker, travelling by bus and train right down to Rameswaram, completely enchanted by the beauty of landscape. However, it was only in 2008 that he started looking at the ancient land as a living laboratory to study its adaptation and evolution. He had come down with members of the British herpetologist society to visit Gerry Martin’s fabled farm on Kerala-Goa border when he was stuck by the awesomeness around him.

There are many reasons to see Aaron Sorkin’s Academy Award-nominated film The Trial of the Chicago 7. Writer-director Sorkin has gifted us with a well-written, often well-acted lesson in history and political philosophy. Although the focus is on ideas, heartfelt emotions, and wry humor leaven Sorkin’s filmic advertisement for organizing for social change.

The century between 1921 and 2021 has been the most turbulent period for human kind as it denotes the century of drastic, political concepts, adoption of economic models and psychological processes. The world had welcomed the proposal of the American President Woodrow Wilson at the World Peace Conference at Paris in 1921. His proposal for eschewing violence and war games, popular governance to all and the free world trade found unanimous appreciation by all participants, recovering from aftermath of the World War First but none took even a step to materialize it. The Second World War imposed on by ambition of the German dictator Adolph Hitler brought unprecedented devastation. Victors were more weakened by six years of fighting. ALL empires collapsed and were forced to liberate their settlements after two or more centuries of subjugation. 139 new nations emerged in seven years of collapse of the four nations’ Axis in 1945.