ERIC WALBERG—Communism’s weakness was to dismiss religion, even though Russian communism became a kind of secular humanist religion, with “icons” of Stalin and other leaders, rituals, and holidays. The economic system of socialism is in fact very close to that advocated in the Qur’an, as I argue in From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization. It is time to heal the lack of understanding between the two ways of thinking.
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PETER SCHWARZ—The growth of the right wing due to the anti-working class policies of the nominal “left” parties is especially pronounced in Italy. Since the 1990s, the successor organisations to the Italian Communist Party have repeatedly enforced the interests of the financial markets and the European Union’s austerity dictates against bitter opposition from the working class. Over the past six years, four successive prime ministers have rolled back the historic gains of the workers’ movement and slashed social benefits.
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In a major breakthrough for the field of nanomedicine, researchers have developed tiny autonomous robots that can shrink cancer tumors by cutting off their blood supply. Using a technique known as DNA origami, scientists from Arizona State University (ASU) and China’s National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) programmed tiny robots to carry payloads of a blood-clotting enzyme called thrombin to tumor-associated blood vessels in mice.
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No More Mr. Nice Guy: Putin Unveils Next Gen Russian Nukes
11 minutes readJOHN WIGHT—The defiance with which Putin revealed the country’s new and enhanced missile technology was unmistakable. It was perhaps illustrative of the years of broken promises, bad faith, duplicity and encroaching and enveloping military pressure exerted by the US and its allies against the Russian Federation. Returning to Cohen: “The most fundamental [error by Washington upon the demise of the Soviet Union] was to treat post-communist Russia not as a strategic partner but as a defeated nation, analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II.”
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Why is China lifting the two-term limit for Xi Jinping?
21 minutes readGODFREE ROBERTS—The official view of the current level of economic development in Chinese society is that it has just reached the xiaokang level. It is hoped that by the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (2021), China will have reached a “higher level of xiaokang society,” and by the centenary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (2049), it will have reached the level of a middle-level developed country and will have “basically completed its modernization”. Thus the term xiaokang, which dates back more than two millennia ago to Liyun, is still being used today to refer to the second-best level of development.