Conflict

Image: LucasfilmIf we take a step back from Obi-Wan Kenobi, the series feels like a narrative waypoint. We know Kenobi’s past, we know how he ends up, so whereis the movement in this series? How does Obi-Wan Kenobi push the arc of the galaxy far, far away towards its predetermined end? Truthfully speaking, I don’t think there is much movement, and I think that’s entirely on purpose. The point of Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t to mark out great battles or universe-shattering encounters between the forces of good and evil, but…

Despite US sanctions, Russia’s oil revenues have increased 50 percent per month since the beginning of 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. From the first day of Russia's attack on Ukraine, the Western alliance imposed harsh sanctions on Moscow to cripple its global finances and force the Kremlin to stop its…

Even as Western countries have tried to isolate Russia and cut off economic ties, energy trade continues in record numbers bringing in billions of much needed hard currency for Moscow. The European Union continues to be the largest purchaser of Russian energy.…

Head of World Trade Organization predicts a "bumpy and rocky" road as it opens its highest-level meeting in 4-1/2 years, with issues like pandemic preparedness, food insecurity and overfishing of the world’s seas on the agenda. WTO chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala lists Covid-19 pandemic, Russia's offensive in Ukraine,…

In the midst of the second world war, Lieutenant Kurt Reuber, a pastor and physician with the German army at Stalingrad, drew a Madonna which hung pinned to a mud wall outside the dugout. In the midst of the darkness, the brutality and the cruelty of war, he portrayed a mother protecting her child from the world. Around the margin are the words: “Licht, Leben, Liebe”. In the depths of conflict and suffering that have occurred so often in the history of humanity (and still occur today), people have always imagined those…

Image: LucasfilmFew Star Wars characters have had quite the evolution like Ahsoka Tano. Famously debuting as Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the character slowly came into her own over the course of the show’s eventual seven-season run, serving as its ostensible protagonist. After being a recurring character in sister series Rebels, and again voiced by her original actor Ashley Eckstein, she made the jump over to live action with The Mandalorian’s second season. Now played by Rosario Dawson,…

Following the Ukraine conflict, American energy firms have taken the opportunity to increase energy production putting action against climate crisis on the back-burner. US energy firms seek to rake in higher profits and ramp up production following the conflict in Ukraine.…

Twitter will now label and suppress misinformation in a major policy review on the social media platform. Twitter announces new misinformation policy over Ukraine. (AFP)…

‘A story can be a weapon,” a character says with metatextual significance at one point in this historical, fact-based drama about the early days of the Arab-Israeli conflict, set in 1948. But Israeli director Avi Nesher seems to be also hoping that this story will be something more like a surgical suture, helping to heal a situation that’s one big mass of psychic wounds left by highly weaponised narratives about the past. It’s an idealistic if laudable goal, and Image of Victory sets out to heal by telling its story from…

November 10, 1938. That morning the Jews in Germany woke up to the sight of shards of broken glass littered on the streets after their synagogues, shops and houses were burnt down. 91 Jews were killed overnight and the Nazis subjected thousands to terror and violence. The earlier night’s horror, a planned pogram against Germany’s Jews came to be known as the Kristallnacht – the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. Exactly eighty years later, million miles away from Germany, a novel-in-stories borrows its title from the same…