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Even though they make up only 8% of schools in the country, crimes, scandals, and arrests take place at a robust tempo in the nation’s privately-operated charter schools.

These non-stop wrongdoings usually include fraud, embezzlement, harassment, and a range of sex crimes.

This is not surprising given the weak accountability, transparency, and background checks that have plagued the crisis-prone charter school sector for more than 30 years.

A small sample of headlines from just this year speaks volumes:

It was celebrated with ghoulish delight. On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed the Penal Bill (Amendment – Death Penalty for Terrorists), an instrument expanding the use of the death penalty for offences of a terrorist nature. The death penalty had previously existed in Israeli law for war crimes but was abolished in 1954 for ordinary crimes in peacetime. Technically, it remained on the books for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and certain cases of martial law.

The law’s purpose is articulated as establishing the death sentence “for the sake of the struggle …

Releasing the Epstein Files, without holding the exposed individuals and institutions accountable, will embolden rapists and pedophiles. Transparency alone is not justice. If we don’t hold these monsters accountable, we will have allowed them to brag to all the world that they got away with rape, pedophilia, and human trafficking.

Transparency without accountability tells victims, “We hear you. We see you. But, this is normal and acceptable.” It sends the same message to perpetrators: We hear you. We see you. This is normal and acceptable.

Transparency without accountability teaches abusers that secrecy is not necessary. Impunity is already protecting them. It emboldens …

“It’s not meant to be happening here.”

Louise Starkey, an Australian influencer in Dubai posted those words to the internet in response to Iranian missiles hitting the United Arab Emirates. The adverb says everything. Life is forever nice “here” because all the crimes we commit “there” are denied a response and whitewashed out of the news “here.”

The phrase, which Starkey erased in response to a tsunami of indignant criticism, aptly sums up the dominant attitude in the Global North, where misfortune is happenstance and the organized brutality undergirding economic life merely makes for an “interesting proposition” in an academic seminar, if …

Wars can distract, and for leaders in political purgatory, they can be particularly useful. It remains to be seen whether the UK’s increasing involvement in the illegal war being waged on Iran by Israel and the United States will serve that purpose. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the great saviour of the British Labour Party in taking them to victory in 2024, is finding himself in sinking desperation. Being less popular than a pandemic, he has much work to do if he is to retain his premiership till and after the next election.

This deepening involvement in the Iran War has …

Britain’s role in the recent machinations of the US empire has been central, despite going underreported and little criticised. Britain has a significant hand in the ongoing US war of aggression against Iran and their recent invasion of Venezuela. Britain’s empire and overseas bases, and associated intelligence and surveillance capabilities, are cornerstones of its contribution to these ongoing wars. Just as Britain’s colonial bases in occupied Cyprus served an intelligence and surveillance role in the Gaza genocide, so to did they help surveil Iran and prepare intelligence in preparation for US attacks, and are now being used as a staging …

Venezuela and Iran hold the largest and third-largest petroleum reserves in the world, respectively. Both have been targeted for regime change by Washington. The world’s hegemon naturally seeks access to such resources. Yet it would be simplistic to think that would be only for narrow economic motives.

Dominion over energy flows – especially from countries with large reserves – is central to maintaining global influence. Washington requires control of strategic resources to sustain its position as global hegemon; a goal reflected in its official policy of “full spectrum dominance.” The 2017 National Security Strategy establishes “energy dominance” as an instrument of imperial power.

For …

International reports of the last five years indicate that bad governance within Pakistan is gaining continuous attention of the watchdogs, lenders, and investigative media.

The issue of governance in Pakistan has become a global concern where economic pressures, political strain and restriction of free expression started to meet. The HRW and Amnesty International reports allege that the pressure is increased on the journalists, activists and opposition staff since the 2024 elections. According to the reports, there are three major trends, namely arrests, made on the law of cybercrime, threats to newsrooms, and attacks on …

Donald Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East is but the latest indication that the system of international law―which provides guidelines for the behavior of nations in world affairs―is crumbling.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after thousands of years of violent international conflict, efforts to establish global norms for nations in connection with war, diplomacy, economic relations, and human rights accelerated. These efforts resulted in the founding of the United Nations (which develops, codifies, and enforces international law), the International Court of Justice (which settles legal disputes among nations and provides advisory opinions on legal questions), and the International …

The United States has once again launched a war in the Middle East based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction. Like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. assault on Iran rests on allegations that international inspectors have already debunked. But beyond the false pretext lies an even more pressing question that few officials in Washington seem willing—or able—to answer: What is the U.S. exit strategy from its war on Iran?

President Trump has justified the attack by claiming that Iran refuses to renounce nuclear weapons. As he prepared to launch the war, Trump repeatedly claimed, “We haven’t …

The March 8, 2026, celebration of International Women’s Day feels loaded. A celebration born of the early twentieth-century women’s labor movement to bolster gender equality and reproductive rights while stopping violence and abuse against women feels hollow and in need of a massive resurgence, given current US politics. With the dissolution of women’s reproductive autonomy, the rise of pronatalism, the silencing of women harmed by sexual assault, and the ultimate silencing of women through state-sanctioned murder, it is an understatement to say we are living in dark times. Simultaneously, however, we are seeing women push back against …

On 28 February, a few hours after negotiators said that Iran had accepted many of the demands regarding its nuclear programme, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. This was the second strike since the United States and Israel attacked Iran in June 2025. Both strikes are illegal, since they violate Iran’s sovereignty, which is guaranteed by the United Nations Charter.

Iran is a sovereign country and, just like the United States, a founding member of the United Nations. It is therefore entitled to all the benefits and responsibilities of the UN Charter. The United States signed and ratified …

Thanks to China’s rare earth restrictions, the US cannot replace the high-technology weapons it is using in Ukraine and the Middle East. Washington just announced that it cannot defend any of its allies in the area apart from Israel, yet will still exhaust its defensive missile inventory within a week. – Godfree.

In the annals of military history, bases have often been the linchpins of empire, the forward redoubts from which great powers projected force and deterred foes. Yet in our era of hypersonic missiles and precision-guided swarms, one must ask: …

“Love In Tehran” © Jan Oberg

“We are someone’s dirty work. And by “us,” I mean Iranians actually living in Iran. It doesn’t matter what group you think you belong to or what you believe; at the end of the day, our lives are just a resource for someone else’s agenda. We are the currency used in a game we didn’t ask to play.”

[This piece was written after the recent deadly protests in Iran in January and before the new invasion by Israel and the USA in February and March 2026. One more will follow.]

The author

We are someone’s dirty work. And …

With the ruling classes shown to be fickle, contemptible and unreliable in fulfilling their obligations to society, much of this confirmed by the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files by the United States Department of Justice, politicians really ought to get their act together. If there are threats to their welfare, why not tell the public of such facts? Is it sufficient to merely say that a threat to the safety of a politician manifested only to then build a fortress and moat around it, imprisoned till careful, managed release?

On February 24, the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese supposedly had …