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With 46% of Nepal’s population under the age of 24, the election will be a test of whether their hopes and frustrations are being taken seriouslyIn the unassuming, dusty lanes of the Nepali city of Damak, an unprecedented political showdown is unfolding. Pitting an old political heavyweight against a rapper-turned-politician with a penchant for dark sunglasses and sharp suits, the battle is one that could completely reshape the country’s politics.As Nepal heads into its most gripping election in years, at the forefront stands Balendra Shah, the 35-year-old known simply as Balen. He rose to fame as a popular rapper whose songs criticised the ruling elite, before pivoting to politics and winning a resounding victory to become the mayor of Kathmandu in May 2022. Continue reading...

China’s progress in building a modern economy, evident in its kung-fu fighting robots and self-parking cars, is hitting limits as a downturn in its housing industry drags on and young people struggle to find jobs

A civilian helicopter has made an emergency landing east of the Philippine capital, killing two of five people onboard and injuring the rest

Nepal is holding parliamentary elections Thursday, a year after a youth-led uprising forced out the government chosen in the last elections

People had sharp reactions Monday after President Donald Trump dropped a confusing remark during a Medal of Honor speech in Washington, D.C. Trump spoke during the ceremony — his first time speaking live publicly since the U.S. and Israel initiated military strikes in Iran — amid growing questions about the conflict and his health. "Finally, we honor one more American soldier, a fallen warria of world. Of wars. And really, terra,” Trump said, which was shared in a video by journalist Aaron Rupar.Media experts and researchers were in awe of the president's comments. "We all luv 2 kill & die 4 a special guy whose brain is a perfect glistening sphere of plaque and grease," Pat Blanchfield, writer and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, wrote on X. "Someone wrap grandpa in a white blanket (the kind with the buckles) and take him back to his nice, soft room," photographer Diana Rivera wrote on X."????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????" MS NOW host and media personality Rachel Maddow wrote on Bluesky. "Ok but seriously why did he say 'Terra?' the man doesn't watch TV that isn't about him, he doesn't read books - where did this word enter his lexicon?" Researcher Craig Johnson wrote on Bluesky."Time for the home," activist Randy Samples wrote on Bluesky.Trump: "Finally, we honor one more American soldier, a fallen warria of world. Of wars. And really, terra.” pic.twitter.com/7Ih78Rwdcp— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2026

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. Truth and Consequence, being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.The book’s subtitle — offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” — could hardly be more timely.Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.At the center of Truth and Consequence are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me … to shake hands with me … to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing — sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence — and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power — those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders – or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.” Daniel Ellsberg in 2002. Picture: Christopher Michel/Wiki Commons.1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence — from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.

Cuba’s government says it has detained 10 Panamanian citizens it accused of creating subversive propaganda in the latest international incident involving the Caribbean island

Sporadic clashes reported in several provinces in Afghanistan as both sides give conflicting death tollsAfghanistan has said it had thwarted Pakistan’s attempted airstrikes on Bagram airbase, the former US military base north of Kabul, as cross-border fighting between the two countries stretched into a fourth day.Months of clashes have flared up again since Thursday, when Afghanistan launched attacks along the frontier and Pakistani forces hit back on the border and from the skies. Pakistan has declared it is in “open war” with Afghanistan. Continue reading...