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LONDON: Julian Assange is free, or soon will be. For 12 years he has been a prisoner: for seven of them holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy as a political asylum-seeker, for five in HMP Belmarsh, his treatment compared to torture by international experts.

Donald Sutherland (1935–2024) who passed away on June 21 projected equal parts warmth, intelligence, and menace on the big screen. But he wasn’t just a brilliant actor — he was a man of the Left who never abandoned those values. There are some actors you can’t help loving. Not many, but the late Donald was definitely one.

The fundamental issue raised by Hollywood writers when they had gone on a strike against being replaced by artificial intelligence, somehow receded to the background after the resolution of that particular conflict; but it remains a fundamental issue. Much has been written about the various problems associated with the introduction of AI; but the one that concerns us here relates to the massive unemployment it would generate.

Do you remember Yohani Diloka de Silva, the young Sri Lankan singer-songwriter, rapper, record producer, and YouTuber who took the music world by storm with a folk song “Manike Mage Hithe” rendered soulfully with elements of contemporary pop and rap? If you are wondering where Yohani is, let us tell you that she is in Mumbai and her latest song “Kella” (girl in Sinhalese) launched in December 2023 has crossed one million viewers two months ago.

Menstruation remains a taboo topic, shrouded in secrecy and discomfort. Despite being a natural and healthy process, societal stigmas and misconceptions perpetuate discrimination against many adolescent girls and young women. This stigma, coupled with limited access to menstrual hygiene products, strips them of opportunities, infringes on their rights, and curtails their freedom.

Heera Mandi - the Diamond Bazaar - Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s latest Netflix production film has created waves globally among the viewers of the sub continent. The focus has shifted to this particular place, now in Pakistan which has been in existence for more than four centuries.

This time last year, theatre director Feroz Abbas was touring the US with Mughal-e-Azam: The Musical, which is often described as India’s most expensive stage production. It has “a cost and crew of over 150, more than 500 costumes, and set so extravagant, they were ferried around in eight 55-ft-long containers.

Each strand of political praxis is informed by a political philosophy which analyses the world around us, especially, in modern times, its economic characteristics. On the basis of this analysis, the particular political philosophy sets out the objectives which have to be struggled for, and the political praxis informed by it carries out this struggle. The objective may be difficult to achieve, more difficult in certain contexts than in others, and this difficulty may act as a hurdle for political praxis; but this does not constitute a crisis for that political philosophy. The sheer difficulty of achieving an objective does not constitute a crisis. A crisis of a political philosophy arises when it has an internal contradiction, when the objective it puts forward is logically in conflict with some other feature in which it believes.

As we are set to observe May 9 as the day of victory over fascism, we are reminded of unprecedented sacrifices made by millions of people who laid down their lives fighting the most ghastly events in the human history. As per the ‘High Point Museum’, ‘World War II that lasted from 1939 to 1945 involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants launched their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. Causes of death included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war’.

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in a small town called Trier, in Rhine province of Prussia in Germany. Prior to him, in 1776, industrial revolution started with discovery of the strength of steam by James Watt in England. With science and steam, entered modernity and also capitalism. Marx stood witness to the evolution and discovered its dialectics which he called theory, scientifically placed as methodology deciphering the stages of socio-economic formation. These stages were linear, never reversible, preserved old with novelty, hence without repetition.