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Shahana Yasmin, The IndependentLondon's Wellcome Collection is returning over 2,000 historical Jain manuscripts to the religious community after concluding that most of them were acquired "at a low price and against the best interests of
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Rising illegal wildlife trade across Himalayan countries is threatening the mountain ecosystem, a Mongabay-India (MI) report highlights.The MI report cited a study titled ‘Ghost economy: The forbidden trade of the Himalayas’ published in January 2026
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The official visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to China is highly significant, especially as it comes just days after the visit of US President Donald Trump. These back-to-back diplomatic engagements between leaders of powerful
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The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MoECC) has revealed a marked improvement in vegetation density across Qatar’s rangeland areas, along with a significant increase in green cover, during the period from 2014 to 2026. In a statement, the ministry explained that this improvement was documented through aerial imagery that monitored the development of vegetation cover in a number of natural areas nationwide, demonstrating the impact of national environmental protection efforts aimed at protecting the terrestrial environment and boosting the sustainability of its natural resources. The aerial imagery provides clear evidence of the effectiveness of protection and rehabilitation programs, field monitoring and regulatory enforcement measures, revegetation efforts, and the implementation of hunting and grazing regulations, the statement read, alongside environmental awareness initiatives designed to strengthen public compliance with environmental requirements in natural areas. The ministry explained that the environmental requirements include adherence to designated routes, avoiding overgrazing and vehicle intrusion into sensitive habitats, refraining from igniting open fires directly on bare soil, prohibiting firewood collection, and maintaining rangeland cleanliness. The ministry noted that the ecological field survey conducted documented the presence of 40,761 native trees and wild plant species distributed across 1,273 meadows and sites throughout various municipalities and regions, reflecting the diversity of local vegetation cover and its distribution across multiple terrestrial habitats statewide. According to the survey findings, the number of natural depressions (meadows) and sites documenting vegetation presence reached 1,121 locations, compared to 152 non-vegetated sites where no trees or plant species were recorded, the statement continued. It added that the survey also identified 179 unique names of meadows, indicating that some mapped locations were registered under more than one geographic range. Assistant Undersecretary for Protection and Natural Reserves Affairs at MoECC Dr Ibrahim Abdullatif al-Maslamani emphasised that the aerial monitoring documenting the development of vegetation cover reflects the terrestrial ecosystem’s natural regeneration capacity in Qatar whenever the necessary habitat protection measures are provided, alongside the implementation of plans and initiatives aimed at reducing human-induced pressures affecting sensitive habitats and natural habitats. This marked improvement in vegetation density and the clear increase in the number of green sites cannot be viewed merely as a seasonal landscape, but rather as evidence of the importance of the environmental protection framework through which the ministry operates, he underlined. The framework, al-Maslamani outlined, includes monitoring terrestrial sites, tracking environmental changes, enforcement against environmental infractions and unlawful encroachments, as well as monitoring activities affecting soil integrity and native vegetation, alongside the enforcement of rehabilitation programs, native vegetation conservation initiatives, and updated hunting and grazing regulations. Al-Maslamani further suggested that the Protection and Natural Reserves Affairs Sector deals with the terrestrial environment as an interconnected ecosystem comprising soil systems, meadows, valleys, wildlife species, and sensitive natural sites, noting that any improvement in vegetation cover is directly reflected in ecological balance, provides better wildlife habitats, and supports sustainable biodiversity conservation in the country. He clarified that the ministry works to protect meadows and terrestrial sites through (combined measures) that include field inspections, remediation of environmental violations, and monitoring grazing impacts, habitat trampling, tree cutting, and illegal dumping, in addition to studying natural sites and identifying their protection or rehabilitation requirements to preserve their natural regeneration capacity.
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Supporters of Bolivia’s former leftist president Evo Morales marched through La Paz, widening unrest that has blocked roads for nearly two weeks and triggered shortages of food, fuel and medical supplies across the country. The disruptions have stranded trucks on highways and left patients unable to reach hospitals, authorities said. Argentina has sent a military aircraft with food supplies at Bolivia’s request. Demonstrations that began with strikes in early May have grown into a nationwide movement involving labour unions, miners, transport workers and rural groups. Protesters are pressing President Rodrigo Paz’s government to roll back austerity measures and address rising living costs, with some calling for his resignation. Analysts say the unrest has broadened from local grievances to wider anti-government sentiment over the country’s economic direction. The protests centre on rising economic pressures. Teachers are demanding higher pay and more funding, while transport unions have launched open-ended strikes amid fuel shortages and supply concerns. Indigenous and rural groups oppose agrarian reforms they say favour larger landowners. Despite the government repealing a controversial agrarian law this month, protests have continued. Paz, who took office in November and inherited an economy in turmoil, has defended spending cuts and fuel subsidy reductions as necessary to stabilize public finances. He is preparing a reform package for Congress that includes gradually lifting fuel price controls and measures to boost domestic energy production and investment. The government has sought to ease tensions through negotiations and wage increases while deploying around 3,500 security forces to clear roadblocks. Authorities said about 57 people have been arrested. Officials have blamed the opposition and Morales allies for encouraging the blockades, which they say have contributed to at least three deaths, including patients unable to reach hospitals. Morales, who governed Bolivia from 2006 to 2019, has backed the protests, describing them as a response to economic hardship and political persecution. Thousands of his supporters have rallied after a judge held him in contempt earlier this month for failing to appear in court in a trafficking case. Morales denies wrongdoing. “As long as the structural demands such as fuel, food, and inflation are not addressed, the uprising will not be halted,” he wrote on X.
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“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Two thousand five hundred years on, the trap is being set again — and this time the stakes are nuclear. When Xi Jinping stood on Chinese soil and asked Donald Trump whether America and China could “transcend the Thucydides Trap,” he was not extending an olive branch. He was issuing a veiled warning, the kind that comes not in thunder, but in the low, measured tremor of a man who believes the fault line has already shifted beneath his rival’s feet. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War. In 2014, Xi invoked the Thucydides Trap, but this time, context is everything. This time, he delivered the message on home ground, before cameras, after what observers interpret as a period of deliberate strategic positioning. To paraphrase British historian Arnold Toynbee: “civilisations do not die from assault. They succumb when they lose the will to respond to challenge.” Xi’s gambit was to whisper, with exquisite courtesy, that the will may already be faltering in Washington. Imagine Sparta, 431 BCE. The campfires burn low. Two generals crouch over a map of the Aegean. Outside, the roar of a navy being built can almost be heard across the water. Archidamus, King of Sparta“What are we to do with this ambitious Athenian? Their ships multiply. Their young men study philosophy and strategy. Do we wait and watch how things transpire — or do we strike now, before it is too late? Sthenelaidas, Spartan Ephor“Athens grows toward us. She builds alliances where we slept. She made Corinth afraid. The Corinthians weep to us for action. If we do not move, our allies will find another protector, and then we shall find ourselves alone and surrounded.” The Athenian statesman Pericles, across the water, understood the psychology of the trapped hegemon with cold clarity. “What I fear more than the enemy’s strategy,” he told the Athenian assembly, “is our own mistakes.” He urged restraint, patience, and the wearing down of a stronger but slower opponent. Harvard’s Graham Allison has documented with clinical precision Athens’ incredible rise. Sparta was the ruling hegemon. In Allison’s landmark study of sixteen such confrontations over five centuries, twelve ended in War, a staggering 75% probability of catastrophe. Washington, our own century. Different rooms; the same dread. Pentagon War Room — National Security Council, circa now“How do we halt China’s rise? Do we keep selling them our debt and hope gratitude follows? We’ve already banned advanced NVIDIA chips and throttled their AI supply chain. We’ve sanctioned their semiconductor ambitions. But they have CATL batteries, Huawei 5G, BYD electric vehicles, undercutting Detroit. Every restriction we impose, they build around. We are Sparta demanding Athens stop building ships, while Athens is already building shipyards.” A senior national security advisorOur long-range munitions stockpiles are not infinite. The Tomahawks that matter most in any Taiwan scenario are already committed elsewhere. Replenishment takes years. Beijing’s intelligence services know our inventory better than some members of this committee.” Napoleon Bonaparte, who understood the arithmetic of strategic timing better than any commander since Caesar, observed: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Xi Jinping has read his Napoleon and Allison’s masterpiece, Destined for War, and internalised the Thucydides Trap. China’s strategy is architectural. For two decades, Beijing has been laying the foundations for an alternative financial order: the Belt and Road, the BRICS currency discussions, the internationalisation of the renminbi, and cross-border payment systems that bypass the SWIFT network. René Descartes wrote that one must doubt everything to discover what cannot be doubted. China has applied the Cartesian method to the dollar system: doubting each dependency, then systematically removing it. What they are constructing is an exit ramp from the world America built, so that if the confrontation comes, the economic shock of sanctions can be absorbed rather than endured. “China is not a problem to be managed. It is a civilisation to be reckoned with — and civilizations do not yield to pressure alone.” — Allison, Destined for War George C Marshall, the architect of European reconstruction after 1945, warned that “the measure of a great power was not its capacity to destroy, but its capacity to build and to understand when the building of another was not a threat, but a fact.” America built the post-war order. China intends to renovate it. And fear is precisely what Thucydides identified as the engine of catastrophe. Not aggression. Not ambition. Fear. Sparta did not hate Athens. Sparta feared what Athens was becoming; it feared the restless vitality of a society that could not stop growing. That fear is what made War inevitable. Today, Xi stands in the role of Pericles: confident, patient, reading his rival’s inner anxiety with a strategist’s calm. America’s generals and presidents are scrambling with the torment of the Spartan King Archidamus: they sense the moment is slipping, the correlation of forces shifting, and the window for decisive action is narrowing with each passing fiscal quarter. Julius Caesar, crossing the Rubicon, is said to have murmured: alea iacta est — the die is cast. No side has yet cast the die, and yet both sides, China and the US, can hear it rolling. Allison does not counsel despair. Of his sixteen historical cases, four ended without war, including the Cold War, in which two nuclear-armed superpowers circled each other for 40 years and repeatedly chose to step back from the brink. The mechanism was what strategists called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), and the institutional scaffolding of hotlines, treaties, and summits that kept misreading to a minimum. Today’s scaffolding is thinner, and miscalculation can spread at lightning speed. The question Xi posed to Trump was not rhetorical. It was a sharp challenge: Do we have the wisdom that Sparta and Athens lacked? Or will the bell toll for us too? American writer Ernest Hemingway posed the perplexing question, “For whom the bell tolls?” In the summer of 431 BCE, it tolled for Greece, and Greece never recovered. Twenty-five centuries later, the bell hangs in Beijing, and China is waiting to see whether Washington answers with wisdom, with panic, or with the kind of silence that, in the grammar of great powers, means everything. “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” — Sun Tzu.The wheel of history does not ask permission. It asks only whether those in its path have the imagination to step aside — or the courage to redirect it. • The writer is a news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.
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For an administration that has been all too willing to weaponize the Department of Justice, the recent indictment of former FBI Director James Comey marks a new low, according to the Tribune News Service.Comey’s purported
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Kyle Ingram, Tribune News ServiceNorth Carolina Republicans have proposed putting four amendments to the state Constitution on the ballot in November. The proposed changes range from establishing a “right to farm” to limiting property taxes
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Lydia Spencer-Elliott, The IndependentAfter just five years of employment, my retirement is a very long way off — about four decades off, actually, which, if I think about it for too long, will make me
