Dilip Simeon's blog

NB:  The Iranian theocracy is an outstanding example of the numerous criminal regimes in the global polity. Only a sustained campaign of democratic persons can stop the increasing criminalisation of state structures, whether founded upon this or that religion; or whether they claim to be secular. Every country in South Asia is also witness to such criminalisation. International democratic solidarity across religious of political divisions is the need of the hour. DS Some 75 Nobel prizewinners have called on the Iranian government to release Ahmadreza Djalali, a researcher in disaster medicine who was sentenced to death last month. The letter is the latest and most powerful protest against the ruling by the scientific community so far. The group wrote to Gholamali Khoshroo, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, on 17 November, and the letter was made public on 21 November. The Nobel laureates express their concern for the conditions of Djalali’s detention; they deem his...

In the months before  Donald Trump  was elected president, Tara Zrinski knocked on thousands of doors in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley to talk with voters about environmental policy. She hoped that the conversations might help elect Hillary Clinton. But some of her most poignant interactions were not about policy. They were about husbands. “We heard women saying that they didn’t want to vote against their husband,” Zrinksi said. “That they weren’t going to vote because they didn’t want to cancel out his vote.” Trump scored a narrow upset victory in the county, which had voted twice for Barack Obama. Trump’s support among women in Northampton probably mirrored his majority support among white women nationally, local pollsters say. That support helped Trump grab the state of  Pennsylvania , and the White House. The loss was devastating for activists like Zrinski. But it was also galvanizing, to an extent that has begun to look bad – possibly alarmingly bad – for Trump...

NB:  This is a prima facie case of unnatural death and the circumstances in which it has been covered up give rise to suspicion of foul play. If our senior judges and police officers believe they can ignore their oath of office (did you swear allegiance to the Indian Constitution or to the RSS?) and allow all this to go unspoken and unchallenged, they will be answerable one day, your consciences will hang heavy. As for the mainstream English and Hindi media, they should hang their heads in shame. This government has succeeded in silencing a section of the fourth estate. More coverage is being afforded to the professional 'hurt sentiment' brigade than to the possible murder of an upright judge who was due to try a very powerful man. It is clear that our ruling class has no objection to extremism; provided it is extremism of the communal variety. Keep silent at your own peril dear editors. And congratulations to the Caravan, for investigating and publishing this deadly story. ...

"Early in the morning, when we wanted to deliver the manuscript to the publishing house, we were arrested. All our notes that had something to do with the book, as well as all computers - in other words basically everything - was confiscated. We then decided to write the book anew in jail. As we were not allowed to use a computer or a typewriter, we wrote it all down with a pencil. As we were in different cells, we sent each other our texts." Baris Terkoglu describes how the book "Sızıntı: Wikileaks'te Ünlü Türkler" ("The Leak: The Popular Turks of WikiLeaks")came into being. He wrote the work together with his colleague Baris Pehlivan in jail. Both journalists were accused of being members of the terrorist organization Ergenekon. The group was alleged to have been preparing for the overthrow of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After 18 months in jail, Terkoglu and Pehlivan were released in 2012. The distribution of their second book, "Mahrem: Gizli...

NB: The essential feature of the fascist project is the abolition of the distinction between legal and illegal violence. The presence of DIG Vanzara, an accused in the Ishrat Jahan and Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter cases, in an RSS meeting attended by its 'Sarsanghchalak' Mohan Bhagwat, ought to have warned us. But our mass media are too busy dealing with 'hurt sentiment' and trivial celebrity utterances to take note of the rapid criminalisation of the Indian polity. DS The Supreme Court had ordered that the trial (of Amit Shah) be heard by the same judge from start to finish. But, in violation of this order, J T Utpat, the judge who first heard the trial, was transferred from the CBI special court in 2014, and replaced by Loya. On 6 June 2014, Utpat had reprimanded Amit Shah for seeking exemption from appearing in court. After Shah failed to appear on the next date, 20 June, Utpat fixed a hearing for 26 June. The judge was transferred on 25 June . On 31 October ...

Any honest accounting of the cultural legacy of the 1960s has to reckon with Charles Manson, who died Sunday at the age of 83. Manson was a human monster whose sole talent was being able to identify the most loathsome potentials of that decade’s zeitgeist and bend them to his own hideous will. He was a terrifying mix of violence, sexual exploitation, and virulent racism, a narcissistic psychopath who used and abused everyone in his path and dedicated his own life to the destruction of others’. In 1969 he devised two nights’ worth of unfathomable slaughter, committed by his followers at his behest, and in so doing obtained the only thing he’d ever wanted: celebrity. Charles Manson embodied the very worst of his era and, to no small degree, every era since. Born in Cincinnati in 1934, Manson’s early childhood was defined by abuse and neglect, the worst possible environment for a boy who exhibited signs of severe personality disorder from a young age. He spent his teenage years in an...

There are thought to be about 10 million distinct species of plants and animals on Earth. That number is incomprehensibly large, not least because  most species are still undiscovered . But now the  Biodiversity Heritage Library , an open-access repository for some of the most stunning images collected of life on Earth, is helping to make these ecological wonders all the more real: It’s made  more than 2 million images  of our planet’s biodiversity available online for free. Anyone can explore the expansive collections, study the digitized materials, and even download the images for whatever scientific - or artistic - project you have in mind. Many of the figures in the library’s collection inspire delight, an assortment of real-life  Harry Potter  creatures. But still others are tinged with existential darkness, like an old black-and-white photo of the American bison, the image of a slain eagle, or renderings of other endangered species. They’re anoth...