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Breaking News

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Since November 5, female patients, visitors, and even medical staff are being barred from public facilities unless they wear the full burqa, an edict enforced by morality police that forces the sick to buy compliance before they can buy time. Doctors report sharp drops in female admissions and delayed emergency care for mothers and children, predictable outcomes when medical need must first pass a dress inspection. This is policy by humiliation: the state polices fabric while pneumonia advances, and families weigh shame against survival. The cruelty sits atop a broken economy that has stripped women of both income and insulation. Afghanistan’s finances never recovered from the asset freeze, sanctions overhang, and the collapse of banking and public payrolls after 2021. Cash is scarce, prices high, and aid flows thinner and more conditional than before; droughts and disasters batter harvests, while urban day labor has shriveled to a lottery. In this scarcity, the regime’s bans on female secondary and university education, and on most paid work with NGOs, government offices, and many private employers, do more than erase careers; they blow a hole in household budgets. Women who once taught school, staffed clinics, or worked for relief agencies now sell jewelry, ration food, or borrow against future remittances that may never arrive. A mother without wages becomes a ward of male relatives; a widow without a male guardian becomes a risk for everyone who shelters her. Healthcare mirrors this freefall. Afghanistan’s clinic network runs on international support and a workforce heavily dependent on women; barring female staff (or forcing them to veil in ways they have not practiced) chokes supply just as new rules choke demand. The result is a deadly feedback loop: fewer female providers means fewer women seek care, which means more home births, untreated infections, and silent deaths. With girls pushed out of classrooms and into arranged marriages earlier, pregnancy starts sooner, nutrition is poorer, and maternal mortality, already among the world’s worst, edges upward. Even routine protections fray: vaccine schedules slip, prenatal visits are skipped, and cancers go undetected because a face covering is now the gate fee for a stethoscope. Daily life for women has narrowed to a corridor of prohibitions. Movement often requires a male guardian; parks, gyms, and universities are closed to them; many offices and NGOs cannot legally hire them; and dress rules are enforced by threats that spill over onto husbands and sons. In cities like Herat, where cultural practice was once plural, the burqa mandate functions as a loyalty oath: obey or be made invisible. For the poor, it’s another tax, on cloth, on time, on dignity. For the sick, it’s a triage criterion masquerading as morality. Authoritarian rule here is accounting by subtraction: subtract schools, subtract salaries, subtract speech, and now subtract care at the door. A government that cannot stabilize currency or feed clinics can always multiply police. Until the international system protects health access as sacrosanct and relief agencies are allowed to employ women at scale, Afghan families, especially women-headed households, will keep living on the cliff’s edge, where a veil is the price of treatment and hunger is the price of defiance.

Continuing Conflicts

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Moscow’s manpower crisis has spawned a grim pipeline from the Indian subcontinent to Ukraine’s trenches. Recruiters dangle student visas and “security jobs,” then hustle young Indian men into Russian-language contracts they can’t read, confiscate their phones, and push them to the front with little training. New Delhi has confirmed dozens serving in Russian units and multiple deaths; families describe bodies returned burned beyond recognition, alongside uniforms and flags that mock the pretense these were anything but coerced auxiliaries. Indian investigators have already arrested alleged traffickers operating across India, Dubai, and Russia, even as more middlemen step into the breach. On the line, the logic is as brutal as it is efficient. Foreign recruits, paid little, poorly equipped, moved in twos and threes, are used as “probes” to draw Ukrainian fire and expose positions, a disposable screen for Russia’s exhausted regulars. The system feeds on asymmetry: a Russian state short of men, Indian youth with thin prospects, and travel brokers converting aspiration into contracts of servitude. One captured 22-year-old from Gujarat says he was given a choice: enlist or prison on trumped-up drug charges. The aftermath is a legal and moral dead zone. Some Indians may not qualify for prisoner-of-war protections; others face years of limbo as families beg for repatriation and governments trade demarches while recruiters reload the pipeline. New Delhi keeps warning citizens away; Moscow keeps calling it “work.” This is what a long war does in the hands of an unaccountable state: it industrializes desperation. The brochure calls it opportunity; the battlefield renames it what it has always been, cannon fodder.

Europe

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In Baku, forced property transfers are becoming the norm. Amaliya Valieva, reported airport police detained her without charge, blockingher lawyer, and then, after an “interrogation” triggered by a complaint from Gunay Masimova, daughter of the National Academy of Sciences’ president, kept her under a travel ban until she transferred her apartment on Heydar Aliyev Avenue to Masimova. Only then, she says, was she allowed to leave. Her appeal is now set for 8 December in the Nasimi District Court. The dispute’s core facts point abroad: the alleged theft of jewelry and $360,000 took place in Germany, where a complaint has been filed, raising basic jurisdiction questions and reinforcing claims that Azerbaijan’s case is leverage, not law. Separate reporting has also circulated allegations about large, undeclared cash and jewelry movements tied to the same family, deepening the impression of an elite shielded at home and litigious overseas. The pattern is familiar: police opacity, coerced signatures, and property as tribute to proximity.

Asia

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Prabowo’s first year in office can be read like an attempted restoration. He has tightened a patronage-and-pressure coalition that treats parliament as a rubber stamp, extended the military’s reach into civilian life through a new law, and wrapped it all in a populist sheen, most visibly a free-meals program pitched to tens of millions of children and expectant mothers. The result, as Eve Warburton argues, is continuity with Jokowi’s “authoritarian revival,” not rupture: selective repression to chill activism, oligarchic politics that reward the wealthy, and a state increasingly comfortable blurring barracks and bureaucracy. Two moves crystallized the slide. First, revisions to the armed-forces law opened more government posts to officers and normalized military roles well beyond defense, changes critics say resurrect New Order habits. Second, Prabowo posthumously anointed Suharto a “National Hero,” a gesture hailed by loyalists and condemned by rights groups as historical whitewash, an unmistakable signal about which past this presidency means to honor. The social policy showcase has its own politics. The free-meals rollout, raced out at national scale, has drawn warnings over safety, cost, and capacity even as the palace touts ever-higher beneficiary targets, charity as choreography under an increasingly centralized state. Indonesia’s advantage remains a public that still mobilizes: youth-led protests forced walk-backs on unpopular moves, even as much of Gen Z backs the government. But the structure is shifting beneath their feet, institutions hollowed, courts politicized, and elections increasingly tilted, exactly the architecture Warburton and co-editors map in The Jokowi Presidency. Unless that architecture is rebuilt, reformasi survives as a slogan while the system drifts, deliberately, toward managed democracy.

Africa

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After a week of funerals and fury, Tanzania has loosened one fist and clenched the other. Police have granted bail to several senior CHADEMA figures, including vice chair John Heche and deputy secretary-general Amani Golugwa, yet the party’s leader, Tundu Lissu, remains in a cell on treason charges, his exclusion from the October 29 ballot still the spark that lit nationwide protests. Prosecutors have moved in the opposite direction of de-escalation: at least 145 people now face treason counts and more than 170 others are charged over the unrest, even as the government declines to publish its own casualty figures amid opposition claims of mass killings. The picture is of a managed release, not a reset. AU observers judged the vote below democratic standards, documenting stuffing and other irregularities; the Catholic Church has condemned the crackdown as “a disgrace before God.” Meanwhile, the state trumpets order while offering neither accountability for alleged abductions nor a credible tally of the dead. In a system where single-party dominance has been the rule in practice since the 1990s, bail for a few opposition lieutenants looks less like mercy than choreography. What follows will determine whether Tanzania steps back from the authoritarian brink or slides further over it. Freeing Lissu, dropping political treason charges en masse, publishing an independent casualty count, and reopening space for assembly would mark a real pivot. Absent that, the country risks entrenching a grim new normal: elections as coronation, protest as felony, and “stability” enforced by the night stick and a blank ledger.

Middle East

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In the shadows of Riyadh’s megaprojects, a statelessness has taken root. Kenyan domestic workers who became pregnant, through relationships or assault, are told their babies effectively do not exist: no birth certificates, no lawful way to enroll in school or get routine vaccines, and no exit permits to leave. Unmarried motherhood is treated as an “illegal pregnancy,” pushing women into home births, unlicensed day cares, and, at their most desperate, onto a median strip by a gas station where rumor says deportations can be arranged. The law promises every child documents and care; the bureaucracy answers with police referrals, networked indifference, and the threat of jail. The cruelty is administrative by design. Hospitals notify police; shelters turn mothers with infants away; and without a father to “verify” a marriage, registration stalls. Kenya’s own officials, entangled in a labor-export pipeline that profits from placement fees, deepen the trap, scolding, stonewalling, attempting to extort the women, and demanding DNA tests that are never returned. Mothers can be deported alone; their children, undocumented, cannot. The result is a population of toddlers raised off the grid in a G-20 state, their existence managed by WhatsApp groups and the kindness of passersby. This system rests on the same logic that powers the Gulf’s domestic labor market: a sponsorship regime that criminalizes leaving abusive employers yet relies on that very dependence to keep households running. It also reveals the limits of top-down “social liberalization” when there is no clear, public path to register a child born outside wedlock. A kingdom that can build cities in the sand claims it cannot find a form for a birth. For authoritarian governance, paperwork is a weapon: if the state withholds identity, it withholds future. Until Saudi authorities translate child-rights law into a transparent, police-free registration channel, and Nairobi stops treating stranded citizens as moral offenders rather than nationals, these children will remain trapped between two sovereigns that each disclaim responsibility. The red dresses and nicknames will endure; the names on the certificates will not.

Americas

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Ortega and Murillo have moved to seal the last open window in Nicaragua: the internet itself. A newly enacted General Law of Convergent Telecommunications (Law 1223) hands TELCOR sweeping powers to compel “all” data from telecom and audiovisual providers, including georeferenced, time-stamped usage, turning the regulator into a de facto surveillance arm that can map who talks to whom, where, and when. Sold as modernization, the statute extends control from content to the channels that carry it, completing the arc from newsroom raids to network capture. Rights groups warn that Article 110 is the tell: periodic or ad-hoc data handovers at the state’s discretion, easily cross-matched with police and intelligence files to profile audiences of “problematic” outlets, trace meetings, or selectively throttle access. Independent Nicaraguan tech reporters and regional NGOs say the law arrives atop an arsenal built since 2018, Cybercrimes, “foreign agents,” and “treason” laws, weaponized to criminalize dissent and exile the press; now the pipes themselves are under party discipline. The measure doesn’t appear in a vacuum. UN investigators describe an escalating system of repression, disappearances, transnational harassment of critics, and the fusing of party and state, while Freedom House flagged the telecoms bill months ago as a vehicle to centralize infrastructure control. In short: after years of smashing the microphones, Managua is seizing the soundboard. Expect more VPNs, whisper-networks, and fear.

Despot of the Week


President Samia Suluhu Hassan

 

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