New Internationalist

VANESSA BAIRD for the New Internationalist Co-operative newint.org Sometimes, no, often, it’s the thing that’s staring you in the face that you do not see; the dramatic scene being played out far away is what defines the subject – in this case, democ

In the slum community in Quezon City, Metro Manila, that 54-year-old domestic worker Reynalda Veloso calls home, there are about 50 families, who, like her, mostly live a hand-to-mouth existence. During the 2016 presidential elections, Reynalda, popu

The full throttled roar of thousands of tractors that disrupted India’s Republic Day rally in New Delhi on 26 January only began to be properly heard across the world when the likes of Rihanna and Greta Thunberg asked why we weren’t talking about the

When soldiers from Polisario attacked Moroccan military posts in the far southwest of occupied Western Sahara in November it was a highly significant moment – the first resumption of military operations since the UN-mediated ceasefire of 1991. That c

For the first time in history the rights of indigenous groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will be recognized under landmark legislation. Communities have lived scattered throughout the dense, tropical canopies of the world’s second-larg

In a significant triumph for women’s rights, Argentina has legalized elective abortion – and in so doing may have paved the way for improved reproductive rights throughout Latin America. On 30 December 2020, Argentina’s Senate passed the Voluntary Te

A friend’s mother has disappeared down a conspiracy theory ‘rabbit hole’. She fears she will lose her family as they, one by one, submit themselves to the vaccine against Covid-19, a covert vehicle for a microchip which will take over their minds. Th

A visceral fear of the invader is alive and well in India. The image of the savage conqueror has evolved from a barbaric Genghis Khan thundering down the Central Asian steppe, or a Muhammad of Ghor descending from the rugged Hindu Kush to establish M

VB: Why does privacy matter? AP: Privacy matters for several reasons. One is to do with self-protection. As a child growing up, one of the developmental achievements is having, or believing that you have, a private space inside yourself that is un-im

In mid-November, The Wall Street Journal published an interview with US petrochemical tycoon Charles Koch. The timing was apt: Koch, and his late brother David, had spent more than $1.5 billion over four decades to push the Republican party to the li

‘In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity,’ wrote Yuval Noah Harari as the first wave

The popular pidgin phrase ‘Naija no dey carry last’, which roughly translates as ‘Nigerians strive to finish first’, encapsulates the entrepreneurship of Africa’s largest economy. It has exported highly successful figures to other countries, particul

My grandmother always led the way in the kitchen. I grew up in London surrounded by Sierra Leonean food: stews, rice, soup, cassava, rich leafy-green sauces, plantain, dressed whole salmon, fried rice, jollof rice, of course – and so many other dishe

And the beat goes on… Diego Quispe (drag name Shamcey La Vie) was one of the leading lights of Lima’s Vale Todo Downtown, Peru’s biggest LGBTQI+ discotheque. Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The club’s owners shifted their business into a Downtown

The 1,758-kilometre border between Nepal and India, through which nationals from both countries cross without needing passports or visas, is one of the busiest human-trafficking gateways in the world. But since the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, which kil

Have you ever seen a house that’s also a hospital? My paternal grandparents’ home is a large, cuboid building in a walled compound, in Bihar, India. At the front is a portico where we spent much of our time during our childhood holidays, sitting on c

JOB: Amazon Founder and World’s Richest Person REPUTATION: A grinning bully The popular caricature of the 19thcentury robber baron financier in the pulp press of the day was a well-dressed fat guy with a leering avaricious expression. Not so Jeff Bez

Subversive, immersive and partially submerged, Arka Kinari is a live music performance, staged from the deck of a traditional sailing ship, which imagines life after the carbon economy. Musicians Grey Filastine, from the US and Nova Ruth, from Indone

directed by Kevin Macdonald 129 minutes A couple of weeks after al-Qaeda’s 11 September 2001 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, Mohamedou Slahi disappears following a family wedding in Nouakchott, Mauritania. He is tran

by Maggie Nicols (Takuroku, DL) cafeoto.co.uk This luminous CD – astonishingly, the debut solo album from the much-recorded Maggie Nicols – touches so many emotions, it’s hard to know where to start. Takuroku is the in-house label to London’s new mus

Q: A number of campaign and community groups I am part of are struggling with questions around access to women’s spaces for trans women, and whether or not to agree with the line that ‘trans women are women’. I am biologically male and identify as a

As the world gears up for the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow later this year, the controversial set of techniques known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is firmly back on the agenda. References to these ‘carbon removal’ or ‘negative-emissions tec

Michael Fakhri took up his post as UN Special Rapporteur in May 2020, just as a global pandemic turned into a hunger crisis and three months before wildfires ripped through his home state of Oregon, US. ‘We didn’t see the sun for six days,’ he recall

Argentina’s Senate recently approved a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion until the 14th week of pregnancy, for whatever reason. In Brazil, a 10-year-old child living in the town of S.o Mateus, who had been raped since she was six by her own

How would you describe the disinformation landscape today? In the digital age our assumptions about what guaranteed a democratic information environment have been turned upside down. We thought it was ‘freedom of expression’, pluralism, the marketpla

1 Keep quality fizz to the forefront when getting high in the Drakensbergs (9,6) 9 Sea east of Arkansas where a boa perhaps gets a following (7) 10 Half of Eton, for example, more than half elderly, make it to the river (7) 11 Female leader tipped of