Iran’s unpopular quest for nuclear energy has dominated news headlines for decades. This has left little room for reporting on less-discussed topics about the country. One of these is tourism.
In 2015, world leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly agreed to 17 goals for a better world. Known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the aim is to meet these objectives by the year 2030 in a bid to end poverty, achieve gender equality, ensure access to quality education, promote economic growth and do much more.
On January 7, the news media announced that Elon Musk had surpassed Jeff Bezos as “the richest person on Earth.” I have a personal interest in the story. Two of my neighbors just bought a Tesla, and this morning, on the highway between Geneva and Lausanne, an angry Tesla driver flashed me several times, demanding that I let him pass. His license plate was from Geneva. Apparently, these days, driving a Tesla automatically gives you privileges, including speeding, particularly if you sport a Geneva or Zurich license plate. In the old days, at least in Germany, bullying others on the highway was a privilege reserved for Mercedes and BMW drivers, who, as the saying went, had an “inbuilt right-of-way.” Oh my, how times have changed.
It’s time we all make peace with our planet — you and me, parents, professionals, leaders and the upcoming generation. All of us have to make 2021 the Year of Peace. Here’s why: We’re at war with our planet. Even if we declare a truce today and start to live more sustainably, it will take decades, if not centuries, for Earth to recover.
For as long as one can remember, the stunningly beautiful valley of Kashmir has been a tinder box of clashing ideologies and religious beliefs. In the not too distant past, it was known as the land of Rishis, holy seers who combined the profound philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism to create a uniquely syncretic spiritual tradition.
In response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, there have been repeated calls to “trust the science.” The first definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary for the word “science” is “the state of knowing,” while the third definition is “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.” Science is not about trust, but instead about knowledge, as obtained through observation and experimentation.
Mohammed bin Salman is a charming fellow. The tall, dark and handsome Saudi prince known as MBS has seduced world leaders and eager pundits left and right. To his supporters, MBS became first in line to the Saudi throne by championing reform in a deeply conservative Gulf kingdom, taking on corruption, confronting religious extremists and promising to modernize the economy. “Someone had to do this job — wrench Saudi Arabia into the 21st century — and MBS stepped up,” wrote Thomas Friedman in an oft-cited column from November 2017. “I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.”
In 2020, exams for the 10th grade conducted by India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) led to impressive results. Of the 1.8 million students who took the exam, 10% scored over 90% and 2.23% scored over 95%. In 2019, a similar number wrote the exam with 13% scoring above 90% and 2.23% over 95%, comprising 220,000 and 56,000 students, respectively. If results were an indicator of the state of school education, India is doing quite well.
For every reader who bothers to write to the author, there must be a hundred others. One reader, Paritosh, wrote to Fair Observer regarding one of my articles that invoked well-understood principles of neuroplasticity to explain how any learning system, child or artificial intelligence (AI) can be damaged by artificial inputs, like screens and online interruptions. For children to learn to trust their senses, they need instant interaction with the real world, just as authors need reader responses to correct their work. People form trust by interacting, not just by reading and listening. This is because we must learn to trust our senses before we can trust anything else.
Science fiction once belonged to the genre of imaginative literature. Today’s media, fishing for intellectual thrills, have encouraged serious people with technological knowledge, industrial intentions and the money to back them to create our first “science factions.” Certain men of our civilization (and not women), devoid of irony and the slightest sensitivity to human psychology but possessed of great riches, have been planning to export our human psyches to other locations in the solar system. If the narcissist Donald Trump only wanted to build a wall, these builders want to build an entire techno-civilization.
