By Karyn Strickler | First published at Common Dreams On July 4, 2025, catastrophic flooding swept through the Texas Hill Country, killing 137 people, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic. Families who sent their children to summer camp would never see them alive again. The floods caused an estimated $22 billion in damage [&helli...
Shabana Ayaz ANKARA, Türkiye (MNTV) — Every morning, my 16-year-old daughter leaves our home in Ankara, the Turkish capital, for school. She changes two buses before reaching her destination. In the afternoon, she makes the same journey back. Sometimes, she walks to a nearby grocery store in the evening. As a mother, I do not […]
By Shabana Ayaz ANKARA, Türkiye (MNTV) — Türkiye’s birth rate has fallen to levels once associated mainly with ageing European societies, prompting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government to put marriage, children and the traditional family at the heart of an increasingly assertive social and demographic policy. That campaign ...
By Bruce T. Boccardy, for Commondreams.org Last March, I wrote an essay providing evidence of the inherent exploitation and undemocratic constructs in our economic model burdening working people. This essay complements that work and will show a fundamental reason why our economic model is structurally limited by attempts to reform it. H...
By Shabana Ayaz Every year, conversations about the hijab return to Muslim communities around the world. World Hijab Day, founded by Bangladeshi-American activist Nazma Khan in 2013, is observed globally on Feb. 1, while in Pakistan the religious political party Jamaat-e-Islami and some other religious and civil-society groups have traditional...
By Iftikhar Gilani When eminent constitutional lawyer and author late A.G. Noorani called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh a “menace to India” seven years ago, his warning was directed primarily at the future of the Indian republic. Today, that warning appears to have travelled well beyond India’s borders. The issue is no longer simply wh...
By Dr. Ansar Jamil When Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement on 7 August, the instinct across newsrooms was to reach for a label. “Islamic NATO,” some called it. Others insisted it was aimed at no one in particular. Both readings miss the point. The pact’s strength lies precisely in [...
By Meg Bostrom, Michael Chameides, Elaine Mejia Two hundred fifty years ago, Americans rejected monarchy. They rejected the idea that power should rest in the hands of one person, one family, or a distant ruling class. Instead, they enshrined an American promise: Legitimate power comes from the people. Our Constitution opens with three words: ...
By Gloria Swindler Boutte, first published at Commondreams.org Juneteenth celebrations in my town were lit. There were so many events I had a difficult time choosing which ones to attend. As a grandmother, I ended up at the event on the grounds of the Historic Harriet Barber house (circa 1875) in Hopkins, South Carolina, where my daughter and ...
*Shabana Ayaz The scenes witnessed in London earlier this month were disturbing not merely because of what happened on stage, but because of the atmosphere surrounding it. During Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally on May 16, activists associated with the French far-right group Collectif Némésis publicly removed niqabs from Muslim women...
