When did the algorithm become the hiring manager? By Emma Schneider

There’s a strange new ritual taking shape in the corporate world, and most of us have already taken part in it whether we meant to or not. It goes something like this, a company receives your application, a machine scans your résumé, another machine evaluates your “digital footprint,” and an algorithm; cold, tireless, impressively unbothered by your liberal arts degree, decides whether you are worthy of human attention. Only after surviving this gauntlet of silicon gatekeepers do you earn the privilege of interacting with an actual person.

For years, job hunting resembled a two-way courtship. Applicants polished résumés. Employers reviewed them. Interviews, awkward, hopeful, palpably human, followed. Someone made a decision. It was imperfect but personal. Now, more and more companies are outsourcing their hiring to artificial intelligence, and it feels less like courting a potential employer and more like petitioning a distant oracle programmed by an intern.

We are told this is efficient, unbiased, future-proof. A neutral system scanning for skills, competencies, and patterns that humans might overlook. But increasingly, it feels eerily similar to asking social media platforms to vouch for our worthiness. Your online presence, your curated selfies, your memes, your half-forgotten posts from 2011, has become a de facto part of the application process. If your Instagram doesn’t disqualify you, maybe your LinkedIn endorsements will. “She has eight endorsements for leadership,” an algorithm might proudly note, while conveniently ignoring that they all came from former coworkers who just wanted to be polite.

The unsettling part is how quietly this shift occurred. Companies now rely on AI-powered applicant tracking systems to sift through candidates with the ruthless efficiency of a paper shredder. They scan résumés for keywords, eliminating anyone whose phrasing isn’t sufficiently optimized for machine digestion. They analyze video interviews for “microexpressions” and “vocal consistency,” as though the act of sweating through a Zoom call were some kind of psychological tell. One system even claims it can assess “cultural fit” using natural language processing, which is corporate-speak for “We want someone who speaks like us and therefore thinks like us.”

And these tools aren’t confined to low-stakes roles. Increasingly, they’re being used to filter candidates for jobs with real responsibility, leadership positions, financial oversight roles, jobs involving public trust. The irony should be enough to make your head spin: a machine is determining whether you’re responsible enough to be in charge.

Of course, AI is not inherently the villain. Used wisely, it can help reduce bias, improve efficiency, and broaden access. But too often, these hiring algorithms simply reinforce the biases of the data they are trained on. If a company historically favoured outgoing extroverts from elite universities, the AI may continue to do precisely that, except faster, at scale, and without stopping to question why all the boardrooms look eerily similar.

Even more troubling is the cultural implication: we are inching toward a world where people feel obliged to perform employability in public. Your posts must be professional but relatable. Your photos should radiate vitality but not frivolity. Your opinions must exist, but only in the safest, vaguest forms. The online self becomes another résumé one that follows you everywhere, glowing faintly behind your digital shoulder with every job you pursue.

This is not merely a matter of privacy. It’s a matter of identity. When companies rely on algorithms to hire, they aren’t simply choosing employees, they’re choosing data models that approximate people. And while the models may be consistent, they are terribly incomplete. AI can tell if you know SQL. It cannot tell if you’re thoughtful, principled, or quietly brilliant. It can detect your ability to speak confidently on camera, but it cannot detect your capacity to lead with empathy in a crisis. It can identify patterns in your work history, but it cannot grasp the context behind your choices, the sick parent you cared for, the industry that collapsed, the bold leap of leaving a stable job for one that mattered.

In the traditional job interview, flawed as it was, there remained the possibility of surprise. A candidate could charm, impress, or challenge expectations. Humanity itself could alter the outcome. Now, we are asked to present not our full selves, but our most machine-readable selves. And that should make us uneasy.

It’s not that AI should be banished from hiring. It’s that we must remain vigilant about how and where it wields power. If companies want to use algorithms as assistants, fine. But when those algorithms become the first, last, and sometimes only gatekeeper, we risk turning work into an automated caste system where only those who speak the dialect of the algorithm pass through.

The corporate world loves to speak of innovation, agility, disruption. Yet there is something deeply unimaginative about relying on machines to do the human work of judgment. It suggests a fear of complexity, an aversion to ambiguity, a preference for tidy metrics over messy humanity. But responsibility, the real kind, cannot be measured entirely by pattern-matching. Leadership cannot be identified by sentiment analysis. And trust cannot be bestowed by an algorithm.

We deserve better than being reduced to data points. We deserve to be evaluated by people who understand what it means to be one.

Dantean World #Poem #Painting by Nikos Laios

They descended down
Through the levels,
They walked past
Death and doom,
Eternal torments,
Famine and greed,
Violence and war,
Hunger and despair,
While the privileged few
In London, New York,
Sydney and Milan
Marched with full bellies
And selective rage
Protesting causes
In foreign lands;
While the forgotten poor
Of the world continued
Their descent through
The levels of their
Own Dantean world.

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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Check Nikos Laios' eBOOK, HERE!

Screening the screens may simply turn tourism elsewhere by Virginia Robertson

The United States has always sold itself as a place of openness, opportunity and above all freedom. Yet the newest proposal from American officials, demanding a five-year social media history from tourists entering under the visa-waiver program, seems to take a hearty swing at all three pillars. The plan casts a wide net over millions of visitors from friendly nations, from the UK to Japan to much of Europe, many of whom have been popping into the U.S. for weekend breaks, business trips and family visits for decades without incident. Now, under the banner of national security, their Instagram posts and Twitter rants are suddenly of pressing governmental interest.

It is an extraordinary ask, hand over half a decade of personal online history or stay home. And when a country begins asking its visitors not simply who they are but what they have said, posted, liked, joked about, or regretted, something profound shifts in the global relationship between traveler and destination.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has set a clear tone, tough borders, suspicious minds, “security first” above all else. This is not a surprise; it is an extension of a political worldview that has long fed on the notion that danger lurks everywhere, even in the Instagram stories of a Scottish couple planning their Florida honeymoon. But the underlying message, intentional or not, is that the U.S. simply does not trust the world, even its closest allies. And when travelers sense they are not trusted, they do what any rational consumer does in a marketplace of options, they shop elsewhere.

Because make no mistake travel is a marketplace, and tourism is business. Huge business. The United States has long benefited from being a dream destination, a place people save up for, romanticize about and revisit. But that dream dims when entry requires a digital strip search. Tourists do not want to wonder if a sarcastic comment about American politics from 2019 will trigger a secondary inspection. They do not want to imagine a border agent scrolling through their TikTok history. They certainly do not want to risk being denied entry based on an algorithmic interpretation of humor or sarcasm.

If Washington’s message is, “We don’t really want you here unless we can read your diary,” many travelers will shrug and say, “Fair enough, we won’t come.”

After all, the modern traveler is spoiled for choice. Paris will still pour the wine. Tokyo will still welcome its punctual admirers. Canada will offer politeness, scenery, and none of the interrogations. Greece has sun, history, and crucially no interest in what you tweeted after the 2018 World Cup. When compared to these destinations, U.S. border procedures are already among the world’s most intimidating. This proposed layer of scrutiny isn’t just more red tape; it’s a glowing sign screaming “Proceed at your own risk.”

For Trump’s supporters who believe this keeps America “safe,” the argument assumes that someone with malicious intent would dutifully supply incriminating online activity as requested. It is security theater, not security strategy. Meanwhile, everyday tourists, the people who spend money on hotels, restaurants, rental cars, Broadway shows, national parks, small-town diners, and suburban outlet malls, are treated as potential suspects. And they notice.

In a time when economic resilience is paramount, pushing away travelers is a peculiar strategy. Tourism dollars are not theoretical. They fill cash registers, pay wages, and fund local economies. Many American towns and cities depend heavily on international visitors. Cutting that flow because of fear-driven bureaucracy is like refusing customers at your shop door because one person, once, shoplifted. It is self-sabotage disguised as vigilance.

But perhaps this is what “America First” has evolved into: America alone. If the U.S. insists on treating friendly travelers as security cases rather than guests, the global public will oblige by spending their money elsewhere. National pride may not care about the hotel industry, but hotel workers, waiters, Uber drivers, tour guides, and shop owners certainly do.

Maybe this is what the MAGA movement envisions, a fortress nation, walled in physically and digitally, suspicious of outsiders and uninterested in charm. But the truth is that isolation is expensive. Suspicion is not an economic growth strategy. Tourists who feel unwelcome do not fight their way in, they simply choose another destination.

So yes, if the U.S. wants to discourage visitors, this new social-media-snooping requirement will help achieve exactly that. The world will not beg to enter a country that treats them like potential criminals. They will take their holidays, their wallets, and their goodwill to places that still remember what hospitality looks like.

And America, convinced it is protecting itself, may wake up to realize it has simply been shutting itself off and this costs money!

AntySaurus Prick #121 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Dino is a vegetarian virgin dinosaur and his best friend is Anty,
a carnivorous nymphomaniac ant.
They call themselves the AntySaurus Prick and they are still here
waiting for the comet to come!

For more AntySaurus Prick, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The thick fog after the fall by Fahad Kline

One year after the chants of “Hurriya!” echoed from Daraa to Damascus, after fireworks lit skies that had long known only the dull orange of mortar fire, Syrians find themselves in a strange, liminal hour of history. They toppled a man who for decades seemed untopplable, the heir to a dynasty of fear, a ruler who treated the country like a private, paranoid kingdom. Bashar al-Assad is gone; this much is fact. But what has taken his place feels less like democracy and more like a weather pattern: shifting, opaque, and impossible to predict.

Syrians mark the anniversary not with the triumphant certainty of revolution fulfilled but with a cautious, almost weary gratitude. There are concerts on the Corniche in Latakia, poetry readings in Homs, youth forums in Aleppo. There are families visiting graves. There are men and women trying to will themselves into believing that the narrative arc of their suffering is finally bending toward something better. But beneath the festivities, beneath the official speeches and the televised address the new president is expected to deliver tonight, lies a quiet disorientation. It is the unsettling awareness that removing the dictator was merely the prologue, not the conclusion.

In the early days after the fall, the country experienced a euphoric clarity. Revolution has a way of making the future feel solvent. Citizens imagined newly paved roads, transparent institutions, overdue accountability, and a political system that might finally be theirs. Committees formed, neighbor spoke to neighbor, and people who had spent years whispering began to speak too loudly, as if making up for lost time. You could almost hear the collective exhale of a nation holding its breath for half a century.

Yet one year later, the fog has returned, denser, stranger, and in many ways more disarming than the darkness that preceded it. Because fog is not the same as tyranny; fog does not imprison you or disappear you into a basement cell. Fog is subtler. It obscures reality. It makes every direction look plausible and every path potentially dangerous. Fog hides the boundaries between hope and delusion.

The transitional government insists it is moving steadily toward a constitutional referendum, toward free elections, toward a reconstruction plan that will transform Syria into a model of post-authoritarian renewal. But such language, while soothing, often feels as artificial as the technocratic diagrams projected behind officials during press conferences. Policies are announced, only to be contradicted days later. Committees are formed and then dissolved. Regional power brokers jockey for influence. Old warlords rebrand themselves as civil-society advocates. Foreign governments offer support wrapped in conditions thick enough to feel like chains.

In Damascus cafés, those that survived the years of shelling and those newly opened with suspiciously generous funding, people debate whether this confusing interlude is merely the turbulence that follows any revolution or the first signs that the future is being negotiated above them rather than with them. The Syrian instinct for reading between lines is still acute, almost genetic at this point. And what they read is this: Freedom is promised, but its shape remains blurry.

The new president, a former judge with a reputation for integrity and an almost monastic seriousness, is expected to reassure the nation tonight. His supporters believe he is the antidote to decades of corruption, the first leader in modern Syrian memory who might not be enthralled by the machinery of power. They praise his quiet resolve, his refusal to turn himself into a personality cult, his early steps to release political prisoners and limit the reach of the still-intact intelligence apparatus.

His critics, however, detect a different story. They see a man hemmed in by the old state’s skeletal frame, trying to steer a ship whose rudder he does not fully control. They point out that the security services remain opaque, their internal hierarchies untouched. They question why certain former regime figures have been permitted to reinvent themselves in the new order, why transitional courts seem more symbolic than functional, and why journalists still hesitate before printing what they know.

And then there is the economy, an exhausted, skeletal creature staggering beneath the weight of both war and its aftermath. Prices have stabilized somewhat, but jobs remain scarce. Entire industries need to be resurrected from scratch. International investment trickles rather than flows. Syrians, resourceful as ever, adapt: informal markets flourish, households rely on complex webs of mutual aid, and young entrepreneurs dream up start-ups that operate largely on optimism.

But optimism is not a governance strategy. Nor is patience an infinite resource.

The question haunting this first anniversary, the question whispered in taxis, muttered in bread lines, and debated in university halls is simple, has freedom arrived or have Syrians merely traded one form of darkness for another, more nebulous one? In the old days, repression was blatant; one could point at it, name it, fear it. Today’s uncertainty is more corrosive. It creates a vacuum where conspiracy theories thrive and where trust a prerequisite for any democracy struggles to root.

Still, this fog, for all its dangers, is not without possibility. Fog lifts. Fog thins. It reveals landscapes once hidden. What Syrians have gained this year, if nothing else, is the right to imagine a future without predetermined borders. For a people long confined to a political maze designed by others, this alone is revolutionary.

The celebrations today are neither naive nor hollow; they are a testament to endurance. Syrians know better than most that history rarely moves in straight lines. But they also know that sometimes, in the long, disorienting aftermath of upheaval, nations find their way not by waiting for perfect clarity but by walking forward anyway.

And so they walk through the fog, yes, but together.

Another Trumpian peace agreement bites the dust by John Reid

In a very short time, the diplomatic rose-tinted glasses used to promote the 2025 ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia have shattered. Less than six weeks after what was hailed as a “historic” agreement brokered in part by former U.S. president Donald Trump, air-strikes have resumed, civilians have died, and mass evacuations are underway. What many predicted that Trump’s peacemaking amounted to an elegant, superficial pause rather than a serious foundation for enduring peace has proven tragically accurate.

It’s not hard to see why. The agreement signed in October included the withdrawal of heavy weapons from contested border regions, de-mining operations, release of prisoners, and a resumption of diplomatic channels under regional oversight. Yet from the very beginning, the truce rested on fragile promises: it asked both countries to lay down arms without confronting the underlying root causes centuries-old boundary ambiguity, nationalism, cultural claims, and a legacy of mistrust that no amount of calendar pages or press releases could remedy.

The first crack appeared with a landmine blast that wounded Thai soldiers, one losing a foot, near the border. Bangkok promptly suspended the deal, accusing Cambodia of planting fresh mines; Phnom Penh denied the allegation. What followed was inevitable: each side accused the other of provoking new violence. On December 8, Thai forces launched air-strikes on Cambodian military targets. Soon after, Cambodia reported civilian deaths and mass displacement. In effect, the calm was never real just a pause in a cycle built on ashes.

This is the problem with show-piece diplomacy: it treats war as an on/off switch. Push a few buttons heavy-weapon removal, gestures of goodwill, a podium photo op and voila... ceasefire. Yet peace, at its core, is far messier. It requires boundary commissions, credible verification, de-mining operations under neutral supervision, cultural confidence-building, community trust. There must be time to untangle maps drawn in colonial eras and to heal the wounds of decades. None of that was remotely achieved in Kuala Lumpur under flashbulbs and global media.

The gap between formality and substance is not a new failure, but a recurring tragedy. The contested border region between Thailand and Cambodia much of it steeped in colonial-era treaties and ambiguous demarcations, has festered for decades. The region has witnessed waves of displacement, trauma, and cycles of violence whenever tempers flared or political winds shifted. What the October agreement attempted was not a resolution but a pause and a pause is not peace.

Trump’s intervention was always part theatre: a bold claim, on his social media platform, that “Peace” had been achieved, that trade talks could resume, that economies lifted. The optics were powerful; the reality was hollow. It echoed past interventions in which a deal is brokered, photographed, applauded, only to fade when the parties return to old instincts. Without sustained mediation, demilitarization, and trust-building, such cease-fires are no more than fragile cobwebs across a chasm of history.

Now, as bombs fall again and villagers scramble to flee, the failure is laid bare: a peace deal that was never built to last, but to headline. It is not just a failure of two nations; it’s a failure of illusions that complex historical grievances can be resolved with a signature and a smile. And as churches of temples, villages, and human lives crumble on both sides, one must ask: whose “peace” was that, anyway?

So long as Washington (or any distant capital) treats frontiers like chessboards, and outer diplomacy like reality TV, wars will end only when the cameras fade and start again when the cameras return. The 2025 Syria-style snapshot of peace was giving the region a pause, not a promise.

It may be that this moment serves as a final lesson for those who believe that high-profile mediators have magical powers. In a world where borders are drawn by old treaties and people live by histories and grief, there are no shortcuts. Peace is not a tweet. It is the tedious, painful, human business of compromise, accountability, song, sacrifice and absence of bombs.

Peak humanity by Brea Willis

Every December, International Mountain Day comes and goes with the same soft-spoken dignity as the landscapes it hopes to honour. Unlike the splashier commemorations those dedicated to coffee, emojis, or whatever else the internet has decided deserves affection this one whispers. Mountains, after all, do not need applause. They are already taller than us. But the question that lingers, uncomfortably, is whether we still deserve them.

Mountains occupy a particular space in the human imagination, part cathedral, part proving ground, part existential dare. They lure pilgrims, poets, mountaineers, botanists, reckless teenagers, and the spiritually confused. They are metaphors even before they are destinations. To “climb a mountain” is to aspire; to “move a mountain” is to achieve the impossible. Yet in the age of climate anxiety and portable espresso machines, our relationship with the world’s high places has taken on a fretful, slightly absurd quality. We bring drones to sacred peaks and leave trash where prayers once were whispered. We speak of conservation while our actions involve far more selfies than stewardship.

International Mountain Day was invented to remind us that mountains matter, environmentally, culturally, hydrologically, aesthetically, spiritually, and, for some people, recreationally. But I’m not convinced that reminders are our problem. If anything, modern society is drowning in reminders. My phone has informed me, three times this week, that I should drink more water and stretch. Somewhere in the algorithm’s vision of my destiny, I am expected to become a hydrated contortionist. And yet International Mountain Day doesn’t trend. It remains a quiet ritual. Perhaps that is the first clue to what it can teach us.

Mountains do not need advocacy spokespeople, though they occasionally get them in the form of celebrities who own puffer jackets. What mountains need, what they demand is perspective. They ask us, politely but firmly, to reconsider our scale. Stand at the base of a mountain long enough and your ego begins to thin out, like oxygen at altitude. It becomes harder to believe the world revolves around your inbox when a ridge of ancient rock is looming above you, entirely indifferent to your schedule.

The trouble is that society has become allergic to feeling small. We’re encouraged to maximize ourselves, to monetize our hobbies, to curate our personal brands as if we are all freelance deities. Humility is rarely fashionable. Yet mountains are masters of humility. They dwarf us physically, of course, but they also dwarf our timelines. We measure crises in election cycles or quarterly reports; mountains measure them in glacial melt and tectonic drift. Their patience is geologic. Ours, meanwhile, is barely enough to wait for a kettle to boil.

International Mountain Day invites us to recalibrate that impatience. And the irony is that the mountains themselves are suffering precisely because of our refusal to slow down, our industry, our extraction, our traffic of tourists hoping to “do” a mountain the way one might do brunch. Entire ecosystems are unravelling at altitudes once considered too remote for human interference. Village communities living on slopes and valleys, the world’s quiet custodians are facing water shortages, landslides, and shrinking grazing lands. The air is thinner, not just with oxygen, but with certainty.

And yet, if you spend time with people who live close to mountains, you discover a different worldview one that doesn’t try to conquer or commodify. It’s a worldview shaped by reciprocity rather than dominance. Shepherds, farmers, and guides don’t merely inhabit mountain terrain; they negotiate with it. Every season is a conversation. Every misstep a lesson. There is something profoundly democratic about how mountains treat their inhabitants: altitude rewards no one. Wealth, fame, credentials, the number of followers on your social platform, none of these things guarantee safety or comfort. You are as vulnerable as the path beneath your feet.

Which brings us to the deeper essence of International Mountain Day: it is less about the mountains and more about the people we become when we encounter them. Step onto a trail, and you are confronted with the limits of your body, the knots of your mind, and the peculiar optimism that compels you upward despite both. By the time you reach the summit or more realistically, a scenic overlook near the middle, you’ve gained something immensely valuable: perspective, the kind not available in convenience stores or corporate workshops.

It would be nice if we treated mountains not as trophies, but as teachers. Their lessons are stubbornly analog in a digital age, move slowly, breathe deeply, look carefully, do not assume you are in charge. Respect the weather. Respect your own limits. Respect the fact that you are an impermanent guest on terrain older than your language.

In many ways, we need mountains now more than ever, not because they need saving, though many of them do, but because they remind us how to be human in an era of distraction. They demand attentiveness. They demand humility. They demand that we pause the infinite scroll of our anxieties and look up, literally and metaphorically.

International Mountain Day may never achieve celebrity status. It may always lurk quietly in December, overshadowed by holiday shopping and year-end exhaustion. But maybe that’s appropriate. Mountains are not designed for fanfare. They thrive in silence. They prefer reverence to trending hashtags. And perhaps the most fitting way to honour them is simply to adopt a bit of their stillness, their patience, their unapologetic solidity.

Because in the end, it is not the mountains that need us. It is we who need their reminder that life is larger, older, and far more breathtaking than the chaos we manufacture daily. And if we listen, truly listen, we might find that the climb begins not on a trailhead, but within.

fARTissimo #018 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

fARTissimo is what people do not see when they see a piece of expression
but what they project in what they think they see.

For more fARTissimo, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Kushner’s shadow diplomacy by Markus Gibbons

Jared Kushner has always moved like a man who believes the world is a deal sheet waiting for his signature, its nations and crises arranged like glass towers on a Manhattan skyline he once imagined himself owning. That confidence, part inherited bravado, part meticulously groomed self-mythology, has rarely matched the complexity of the geopolitical landscapes through which he glides. Yet he glides anyway, unfazed, the heir to a family history where audacity is indistinguishable from entitlement and where the line between visionary and con man is blurred by the simple fact that one can become the other if the timing is right.

So here we are again, with Kushner cast implicitly or explicitly depending on the day, as yet another “envoy,” another “negotiator,” another unofficial-official messenger wandering into global fault lines as if they were marital squabbles requiring his favored toolkit of confidence, charm, and a belief that any problem can be fixed by the right rich man making the right phone call. Whether it’s Moscow and the mirage of “Ukrainian peace,” Gaza where his personal and political investments intertwine with unnerving neatness or the Balkans where post-conflict tensions remain combustible Kushner seems to appear exactly where diplomacy is least forgiving of dilettantes.

It is difficult to imagine a figure less suited to the high-wire act of conflict resolution than a man whose worldview was sculpted in the boardrooms of New York real estate and the echo chamber of dynastic Republican politics. Yet Kushner has always behaved as though geopolitical fractures are simply the next iteration of complex financing, messy, emotional, but ultimately negotiable if one has the right leverage and the right last name. And in that sense, he is following family tradition.

His father’s legacy looms, though rarely discussed in polite company around the Kushner dinner table. Charles Kushner, a man of outsized ambition and equally outsized scandal provided Jared with both a fortune and a blueprint, be bold enough to step where others hesitate, and you might just remake the narrative to suit your needs. If not, the fallout can always be repackaged as persecution. Donald Trump, Jared’s father-in-law, expanded this blueprint into a worldview, one that treats truth as pliable, institutions as props, and international relations as an endless series of rooms in a hotel that can be re-decorated depending on which patrons you’re trying to impress.

Jared learned from the best, if “best” refers to showmanship, myth-building, and a flair for operating in the gray zones of influence. With Trump, he graduated from real-estate scion to global whisperer. He became the young man sent to smooth over crises older men had created; a self-styled prodigy who saw diplomacy not as the slow accumulation of expertise but as a personal test of ingenuity. If traditional envoys arrived with decades of regional study and fluency in political nuance, Kushner arrived with PowerPoints and the airy conviction that peace was simply the product of well-aligned incentives.

This background makes his apparent involvement in various global flashpoints not only peculiar but disquieting. The image of Kushner jetting into Moscow again, not as a formal diplomat but as a figure who seems to exist in a liminal zone between private citizen and political surrogate, captures a certain absurdity of the modern era. The world’s greatest conflicts, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, now feel like stages on which brands, families, and billionaires rehearse their roles as if auditioning for future chapters in their memoirs.

The Gaza angle is particularly glaring. Kushner’s personal and financial interests in the region collide awkwardly with his political posturing, raising a question older than the Republic itself: when private investments intertwine with public influence, where does strategy end and self-dealing begin? Kushner tends to answer this not with clarity but with the serene confidence of a man who expects the public to believe that good intentions automatically cancel out conflict of interest. That serenity has long been his superpower. It is also his shield.

The Balkans, meanwhile, serve as yet another example of Kushnerian overreach, a region with a long memory and layered wounds, far too complicated for quick fixes or entrepreneurial diplomacy. Yet Kushner wades in with the same unshakable assurance, as though history can be talked down from its ledges by a well-timed handshake and a reminder that “both sides want stability.” It is the kind of simplification that only makes sense to someone whose success has never depended on understanding the stakes experienced by ordinary people.

What makes Kushner’s presence so striking isn’t simply the audacity. It’s the pattern. The persistent, almost hereditary belief that access equals expertise, that proximity to power is the same as mastery of it. Trump once sold himself as a dealmaker who could charm authoritarian strongmen into peace agreements; Kushner has inherited that swagger without its original craftsmanship, thin as that craftsmanship already was.

In the end Kushner represents a particular American archetype, the privileged son who believes the world is his internship, its crises his résumé enhancers. But unlike the typical scion, he has drifted into places where the stakes are measured not in dollars but in lives. This should worry anyone who believes diplomacy requires more than confidence and connections. The world is not a portfolio. Peace is not a development project. And statesmanship isn’t a family business.

Yet Jared Kushner keeps showing up, briefcase in hand, confident as ever. The question is not why he goes. It is why anyone keeps opening the door.

The pardon reflex by Robert Perez

There is an unmistakable rhythm to political power once it realizes it can bend the rules of consequence. It begins quietly almost imperceptibly like the faint creak of a hinge on a door you did not expect to open. Then, once the precedent is established and the hinge has taken its first turn, others step forward, testing its strength, pushing harder, emboldened by the sound they’ve now recognized as opportunity.

Donald Trump with his parade of pardons, did more than merely absolve a roster of loyalists and rogues. He demonstrated that the highest office in the United States could be wielded not simply as an instrument of executive mercy but as a political tool, one capable of granting absolution to individuals who, by every traditional understanding of justice, should have served the remainder of their sentences contemplating the gravity of their crimes. His pardons functioned like VIP passes to a different tier of accountability, one reserved for the connected, the useful, the faithful.

And once a system learns that accountability is optional, it becomes a contagious notion. The world watches, takes notes and sometimes imitates.

Enter Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in the deepening mire of his corruption trial and the growing pressures of governance, has reportedly turned toward the Israeli presidency with the same sort of political bravado, a hint, a suggestion, perhaps even an expectation that a pardon might be in order. Whether framed as a request or a demand depends on one’s reading of Israel’s political wind patterns, which are notoriously unpredictable. But the mere fact that the idea hangs in the air with any degree of plausibility is, in itself, a troubling sign.

The concept of a leader seeking a pardon while still in power and intending to remain in power edges precariously close to a parody of democratic norms. It transforms what should be the solemn ritual of accountability into something resembling a self-service kiosk: press here to skip the legal process; press again to sanctify the act as necessary for national stability. A nation that prides itself on having a vigorous judiciary suddenly finds itself caught between the abstract ideal of equality before the law and the concrete reality of a prime minister who refuses to step aside even when standing trial.

Netanyahu, of course, is a master of political survival. His career is defined by agility, resilience, and the kind of self-assured conviction that allows a leader to frame personal battles as national ones. He is not the first embattled politician to perceive legal accountability as an existential threat to their leadership and he will not be the last. But the emerging pattern, inspired in part by what Trump normalized, is that leaders in legal peril increasingly view the possibility of a pardon not as a last resort but as a strategic pivot.

A pardon, once considered an extraordinary act, has begun to take on the character of a political escape hatch. Under this new framework, the legal process is not merely a system to be navigated but an obstacle to be surpassed preferably by leaping over it entirely.

What is most concerning is not that Netanyahu might seek a pardon. Politicians seek all manner of things. It is the shifting expectation that such a move could even be entertained. Democracies rely on a delicate lattice of norms, expectations, and unwritten rules. Once leaders discover those norms can be manipulated or worse, ignored, the lattice begins to buckle.

Israel, like the United States, exists in a moment of centrifugal political forces. Institutions strain under the weight of conflict, polarization, and public exhaustion. Citizens who once believed in the symmetry of justice begin to suspect the system operates on a tilt. And in such an environment, a pardon for a sitting prime minister whether granted, demanded, or merely floated, has the potential to become not just a legal maneuver but a symbolic fracture.

Imagine the consequences: a leader absolved before judgment, freed from the shadow of legal scrutiny, emboldened by a system that blinked first. What follows is not simply the survival of one politician but the erosion of a principle that undergirds every functioning democracy: that leaders, too, are bound by law.

A nation that pardons its leaders while they are still in office risks normalizing the idea that power itself is an alibi. It tells future leaders some more benign, others potentially far more dangerous that accountability is negotiable. That the law is pliable. That the future remains in the hands of those who survive long enough to rewrite the terms of their own innocence.

Critics will argue that the political landscape requires flexibility. That stability is paramount. That a leader under scrutiny might still be indispensable. But indispensable leaders are the cornerstones of many broken democracies. The argument that someone is too vital to face justice is often the prelude to the realization that the system was never strong enough to restrain them.

Israel now stands at a crossroads, one that America has recently encountered, and one that other democracies will confront again. The question is not just whether Netanyahu will seek or receive a pardon. The deeper question is whether the political imagination of modern leadership has fundamentally shifted. Whether we have entered an era in which the powerful see legal consequence not as something to avoid but as something to circumvent through political leverage.

Trump’s pardons cracked open the door. Netanyahu’s situation tests how wide it can swing.

And the rest of the world, leaders, citizens, and courts alike, must decide whether that door becomes a permanent feature of twenty-first-century politics or whether democracies still possess the will to close it.

Eleanor Roosevelt, World Citizen by Rene Wadlow

10 December :  Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights
as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,
to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance.
            - Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

It was Eleanor Roosevelt who helped to craft and then championed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose  anniversary we celebrate on 10 December.  She was appointed the US representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights and was then chosen as its chairperson.  Originally, her selection was a reflection of respect and gratitude toward her husband Franklin who had been the US leader during the Second World War and who wanted to avoid a US refusal of a world institution as had been the case with the League of Nations after World War I.

However, Eleanor was much more than the widow of FDR.  She had always been an ‘internationalist’ concerned with the establishment of machinery that would ensure a lasting peace.  In 1939 she had read Clarence Streit’s Union Now and had the author dine at the White House to explain his ideas of a federal union among democratic countries.  She accepted to serve as a delegate to the first UN General Assembly held in London “largely because my husband laid the foundations for the organization through which we all hope to build world peace.” (1)

She worked closely at the first UN General Assembly with Adlai Stevenson, a member of the early World Citizen Association founded in 1939.  Stevenson headed the US delegation for preparing the General Assembly and the Commissions. There were only 18 women from 11 different countries at this first UN meeting in London, but at least, a permanent commission on the status of women was created.

Mrs Roosevelt’s work as chair of the Commission on Human Rights was crucial in integrating the world’s ideologies into a truly universal conception of human rights. There were strong-minded representatives as key members of the Commission which wrote the Declaration: Dr Peng-Chun Chang of China, Dr Charles Malik of Lebanon, and Professor René Cassin of France with Dr John Humphrey of Canada as the first Human Rights Director.  Once the Soviets saw that the human rights efforts would grow in importance, the USSR named higher level representatives, in particular Alexander Bogomolov, an experienced diplomat and legal scholar.

She helped to bring together into one document – The Universal Declaration – the political and civil rights that are the core of the Western liberal tradition with the economic, social and cultural rights that had been at the fore of the struggles for social justice of the 1920s and 1930s.

Finally, on 10 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration, 48 countries in favour, none against, 2 absent, and 8 abstentions: Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Union of South Africa, USSR and Yugoslavia. With the Declaration, as Herbert Nicholas in The United Nations as a Political Institution noted “ Man, the individual human being, has emerged on the international scene which in the past was the jousting ground only of States.”

Human rights have become today  a central framework of the world society..  People, no matter where they live, increasingly demand respect for their human rights and judge the institutions of the world society by how well these institutions respond to a comprehensive vision of human rights.  Food, shelter, employment, education and access to health care go hand in hand with demands for equitable and effective justice, the right to participate in government, to express one’s thoughts freely and to live by one’s own moral and spiritual convictions.

Notes: 1. See Joseph P. Lash Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972)

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Rene Wadlow, President,  Association of World Citizens