The village waiting room by Avani Devi

India likes to describe itself as an emerging power. Its satellites reach space, its digital payments move billions of transactions and its cities advertise themselves as laboratories of the twenty-first century. Yet beyond the highways and technology parks lies another India, where a sick villager may still have to travel for hours to find a doctor, and where a child can attend school without receiving an education worthy of the century.

This is not simply a problem of poverty. It is a problem of priorities. Rural healthcare remains particularly vulnerable to the chronic shortage and uneven distribution of medical personnel. Government data have long recorded vacancies at rural primary health centres, while the wider health system continues to struggle with inadequate infrastructure and staffing. The official Indian Public Health Standards assessment itself shows that a large share of assessed facilities fall below desirable performance levels.

The arithmetic is brutal. A hospital bed is not much use without a doctor. A doctor is not much use without nurses, medicines, diagnostics and functioning transport. And an insurance card does not magically create a clinic in a village.

India's government has certainly launched programmes. Ayushman Bharat expanded financial protection and sought to bring primary care closer to communities; the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana has expanded major medical institutions. These are real initiatives. But they do not remove the central contradiction: a country can build prestigious tertiary hospitals while leaving millions dependent on an overstretched rural primary-care system.

Education presents the same paradox. India has millions of children enrolled in schools, but enrolment is not the same thing as learning. The latest official data still show substantial secondary-school dropout, while more than 100,000 schools operate with a single teacher. More than 3.3m pupils are enrolled in such schools.

The government can celebrate the architecture of the National Education Policy, but policy documents do not teach mathematics. Teachers do. Classrooms do. Libraries do. Reliable electricity, laboratories, computers and trained educators do.

There is also a deeper problem. Rural India does not merely need more schooling; it needs schooling that prepares children for an economy changing faster than many curricula. Memorisation may produce examination certificates, but it does not necessarily produce curiosity, scientific reasoning, digital competence or vocational confidence. A child in a village should not receive an inferior education simply because geography has assigned him a poorer postcode.

This is where the Modi government's development narrative deserves harder scrutiny. India has demonstrated that the state can mobilise enormous resources when political attention is concentrated. The question is why basic human infrastructure so often receives less urgency than grand national projects.

A modern India cannot be measured only by airports, expressways, skyscrapers and technological triumphs. It must also be measured by how long a farmer waits for a doctor and whether his daughter can leave school with knowledge rather than merely a certificate.

The uncomfortable truth is that India's greatest infrastructure deficit may not be concrete. It may be opportunity. And opportunity, unlike a highway, cannot be inaugurated with a ribbon.

The hybrid war is here by Marja Heikkinen

For years, “hybrid war” has sounded like one of those expressions invented by defence analysts to make PowerPoint presentations seem more frightening. It meant sabotage without fingerprints, drones without declarations, cyberattacks without tanks, disinformation without uniforms and intimidation carefully calibrated to remain just below the threshold of war.

Europe could discuss it endlessly because, technically, it was not quite happening. That convenient distinction has now become considerably harder to maintain. On Monday, a Russian frigate in international waters off Denmark fired two flares towards a Danish military helicopter conducting a routine photographic mission, with one passing close to the aircraft. Hours later, NATO fighter jets shot down a drone that had entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus. The drone was subsequently found to have carried an explosive device. These were separate incidents, and there is no evidence that they were coordinated. But politically and psychologically they belong to the same unsettling landscape: a Europe in which military pressure is increasingly arriving not as an announced invasion but as a series of incidents, provocations and tests.

This is precisely what makes hybrid warfare so dangerous. It does not arrive wearing a name tag. A missile crossing a border is easy to understand. A warship firing a flare can be dismissed as intimidation, misjudgement or maritime theatre. A drone can be described as lost, malfunctioning or belonging to somebody else. A cyberattack can be blamed on criminals. A railway disruption can be sabotage or coincidence. A disinformation campaign can be dismissed as internet rubbish.

Put them together, however, and Europe begins to discover the uncomfortable mathematics of modern confrontation: one incident means little; fifty incidents become a strategy.

The Kremlin has long understood this ambiguity. Its great advantage is not necessarily military superiority but the ability to make Europeans argue about what they have just witnessed. Was it deliberate? Was it accidental? Was it Russian? Was it Belarusian? Was it a provocation? Should NATO respond? Would responding make things worse?

The argument itself becomes part of the weapon. And there is something particularly revealing about the Danish episode. A military helicopter was not attacked with a missile. It was confronted with flares. That is almost theatrical: bright lights in the sky, enough to frighten, perhaps enough to damage, but ambiguous enough to leave room for Moscow to say that nobody really meant anything.

This is intimidation designed for the television age. The Lithuanian incident is more serious. NATO aircraft actually destroyed an unidentified drone inside the territory of a member state. Whatever the original intention, the event demonstrates something Europe has spent years trying not to contemplate: NATO's eastern frontier is no longer merely a geopolitical boundary. It is becoming an operational environment.

The danger is not that Europe suddenly wakes up tomorrow morning to Russian tanks crossing Poland. The greater danger is escalation by accumulation.

A drone here. A damaged cable there. A suspicious fire somewhere else. GPS interference. Cyberattacks. Sabotage. Naval harassment. Political financing. Migrant pressure at a border. Fake videos. Threatening exercises. An aircraft intercepted too aggressively. A ship approaching a little too closely.

Eventually somebody miscalculates. That is where the hybrid war becomes something less hybrid. Europe therefore needs to stop treating every incident as an isolated irritation. The question is not whether every strange event can be traced directly to Moscow. The question is whether European societies are resilient enough to withstand a campaign in which responsibility is deliberately obscured and political reactions are themselves targets.

Russia does not need to defeat NATO militarily to weaken it politically. It only needs Europeans to become frightened, divided, suspicious of one another and exhausted by permanent uncertainty. That is the real battlefield.

The Baltic Sea suddenly looks less like Europe's northern swimming pool and more like a nervous military corridor. Lithuania, Denmark, Poland, Finland, Sweden and the Baltic states are discovering that geography has returned with a vengeance.

The era when Europeans could discuss hybrid war as a theoretical concept is ending. The flares have already been fired. The drone has already been shot down. The question now is whether Europe understands what the lights in the sky are trying to tell it.

#eBook The Inheritance of Shadows by Thanos Kalamidas

Germany’s post-war history is often told as a story of democratic redemption: defeat in 1945, division into two states, reunification in 1990, and the emergence of a stable European power.

Yet beneath that reassuring narrative lies a more uncomfortable inheritance. The far right did not suddenly appear in modern Germany. It survived, adapted and, after reunification, found new political terrain in which to grow.

The collapse of East Germany was supposed to settle one historical argument. Stalinism had failed, and liberal democracy had triumphed. But political identities rarely disappear as neatly as regimes do. In the former East, decades of authoritarian socialism had produced alienation from institutions, resentment towards distant elites and a profound distrust of political language. The ideology changed; some of the emotional architecture remained. The enemy was no longer the capitalist West or the communist class enemy. Increasingly, it became the migrant, the foreigner, the European bureaucrat and the cosmopolitan liberal.

How Unification, Conservatism and the Far-Right Reshaped Germany

“Germany did not inherit the far right from its past; it inherited the shadows of its past and then gave them new political clothes.”

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

The Inheritance of Shadows

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Insert Brain Here: Jerk Chicken #Cartoon by Paul Woods

 

Originally from Port Macquarie, Australia, Paul Woods is a Cartoonist and Illustrator based in South London who also plays drums, works as a Cameraman and likes bad horror films. His series of cartoons is entitled "Insert Brain Here"

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Fika bonding! #129 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Fika is a state of mind and an important part of Swedish culture. It means making time for friends and colleagues to share a cup of coffee and a little something to eat.

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The space is armed by Thanos Kalamidas

For decades, space has been treated as the last respectable neighbourhood in an increasingly disreputable world. Down here, on Earth, nations have accumulated enough missiles, submarines, drones, cyberweapons and artificial intelligence to make the Cold War look almost artisanal. But above our heads there remained, at least officially, a certain innocence. Satellites watched, listened, photographed, guided missiles, spied on enemies and helped us find the nearest pizza restaurant, but weapons in orbit belonged largely to the realm of suspicion, military jargon and science fiction.

Then the Americans decided to say the quiet part aloud. The announcement that the United States has deployed “on-orbit space control weapons” is remarkable not necessarily because the weapons exist, but because Washington has chosen to acknowledge them. Nobody with even a passing acquaintance with military history should be shocked by the idea that the major powers have spent years, perhaps decades, preparing for war beyond the atmosphere. The real mystery is why the United States has suddenly decided that secrecy is less useful than publicity.

This is where space becomes less Star Trek and more Kafka. The first possibility is deterrence. Perhaps Washington wants Moscow and Beijing to know that American satellites are no longer simply expensive cameras floating helplessly through the darkness. Perhaps the message is: touch ours, and we can touch yours. In the old language of nuclear strategy, this was called stability through mutual terror. The new version comes with solar panels.

The second possibility is political. Announcing weapons in orbit is also a useful way of telling Congress, taxpayers and allies that the Space Force is not merely a collection of uniforms designed for recruiting posters. Bureaucracies, particularly military ones, thrive on threats, and nothing says “please continue funding us” quite like the suggestion that the next war may begin somewhere between the International Space Station and a communications satellite.

But there is a third possibility, and it is the one that should make us most uncomfortable. Perhaps the Americans are announcing these weapons because the strategic competition in space has already moved much further than the public has been told.

Russia and China have both developed and demonstrated capabilities designed to interfere with, disable or destroy satellites. The United States, meanwhile, has spent decades building the most sophisticated military dependence on space in history. Modern armies do not merely use satellites; they depend upon them for communications, navigation, surveillance and targeting and early warning. Destroy enough satellites and a technologically advanced military can suddenly discover the strategic advantages of being blind.

Britain and other established military powers undoubtedly possess capabilities that remain classified. The important question, however, is not simply who has weapons in space. It is what kind of weapons they are.

There is a profound difference between a satellite capable of jamming another satellite, a robotic vehicle able to approach and disable one, a conventional projectile, a directed-energy system, and a nuclear device. Yet the secrecy surrounding space warfare encourages the public imagination to throw everything into one large orbital suitcase marked classified.

The greatest danger remains nuclear weapons in space. A nuclear explosion above the Earth would not need to destroy cities directly to cause catastrophe. It could devastate satellites, communications and electronic infrastructure on which modern societies depend. Chemical weapons, meanwhile, make considerably less strategic sense in the vacuum of space, where there is no atmosphere in which a poisonous cloud can conveniently drift towards its victims. But military planning has never been famous for respecting common sense simply because physics happens to exist.

And that may be the real significance of this American announcement. The weaponization of space is no longer merely something everyone suspects everyone else is doing. It is becoming part of the public vocabulary of military competition.

For years, humanity has looked upward and imagined the future. Now the great powers are looking upward and seeing the next battlefield.

We should not be surprised. We should, however, be worried. Every frontier we have discovered has eventually acquired a flag, a military base, a commercial logo and somebody explaining that the weapons are there only to preserve peace. Space, apparently, has finally joined the family.

The truce that exists only in Trump’s head by John Kato

Every time Donald Trump announces a ceasefire before the people supposedly involved in it have agreed to one, he hopes that diplomacy performs backwards. First comes the declaration, then perhaps the negotiation and finally, if everyone is still interested, the reality. In the meantime, the president gets to stand in the middle of the stage and announce another achievement.

Except that Ukraine and Russia did not appear to receive the script. Trump declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure. Kyiv, however, said there was no final agreement, while Moscow offered the sort of qualified enthusiasm normally associated with a salesman discovering that the customer has not yet signed the contract. The war continued, including attacks on energy facilities.

This should no longer surprise anyone. Trump has developed a peculiar theory of international relations in which saying something with sufficient confidence is almost equivalent to making it happen. The distinction between an agreement, a proposal, a conversation and something that simply occurred inside his head has become increasingly decorative.

The problem is not merely that Trump gets ahead of negotiations. The deeper problem is that he treats reality itself as negotiable. A ceasefire is not a press release. It is not a Truth Social announcement. It is not a presidential adjective attached to an unfinished conversation. A ceasefire exists when missiles stop flying, drones stop arriving and the people who operate them have orders to stop. Everything else is theatre.

And Ukraine has every reason to be cautious. Russia has used pauses, negotiations and supposed de-escalations before. Kyiv therefore wants something remarkably unfashionable in Trump's world: guarantees. If Russia genuinely stops attacking Ukrainian electricity, energy infrastructure and other critical targets, Ukraine says it is prepared to reciprocate. That is not rejection of peace. It is the minimum requirement for believing in one.

The irony is that Trump appears increasingly interested in the price of diesel than in the architecture of peace. That is not entirely surprising. Fuel prices are immediate, measurable and politically painful. A refinery somewhere in Russia is easier to explain to an American driver than the complicated strategic consequences of allowing Moscow to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure. Trump can point towards the petrol pump and declare that Ukraine is responsible for the bill. Geopolitics becomes a domestic price tag.

But wars are not spreadsheets. Ukraine attacks Russian energy infrastructure because energy is part of Russia's war machine. Russia attacks Ukrainian energy infrastructure because Moscow has repeatedly used the destruction of civilian infrastructure as a weapon of pressure. Pretending that these actions exist in some neutral economic universe, detached from the military logic of the war, is convenient but intellectually dishonest.

There is another danger in Trump's premature diplomacy. Every imaginary breakthrough eventually becomes somebody else's failure. If the truce collapses, Trump can say Russia or Ukraine violated it. If there was never a real agreement, nobody will be able to prove precisely who broke what. The president's claim floats safely above the wreckage, untouched by accountability.

This is diplomacy as personal branding. The tragedy is that there really could be value in an energy ceasefire. Protecting power stations, refineries and civilian energy systems would save lives and reduce suffering. It could become a modest first step towards something larger. But precisely because it matters, it cannot be manufactured through presidential improvisation.

Peace requires boring things: written commitments, verification, enforcement, trust built painfully over time. It requires people to negotiate the details Trump tends to leap over because the details are where reality lives. Trump prefers the headline.

Ukraine needs the agreement behind it. Russia needs to demonstrate that it means it. And the rest of us might reasonably ask that the next time Donald Trump announces that Russia and Ukraine have agreed to something, someone checks with Russia and Ukraine first. Otherwise the world's newest diplomatic institution may be the Trump ceasefire: announced in Washington, discovered nowhere else, and apparently operational only inside the president's imagination.

General’s last march by Robert Perez

There are deaths that close a chapter, and there are deaths that reopen the book. The funeral of Ratko Mladić in Belgrade belonged firmly to the second category. Mladić died as a convicted war criminal, serving a life sentence for genocide and other crimes committed during the Bosnian war. Yet in death he was transformed, for thousands of mourners, into something quite different: a military hero, a Serbian patriot, a man deserving ceremony rather than shame. The spectacle was not merely disturbing. It was politically revealing.

The most poisonous element was not that ordinary people attended. Democracies, unlike dictatorships, cannot legislate grief. Families mourn their dead; societies argue about history; even monsters have relatives and admirers. The real scandal was the presence of senior political figures, including Serbia’s justice minister, at a funeral staged with military honours. When the state lends its dignity to a convicted architect of mass murder, it is no longer simply tolerating historical revisionism. It is participating in it.

That distinction matters. Mladić was not condemned because he lost a war or because his politics became unpopular. He was convicted because a court established his responsibility for some of the gravest crimes committed in Europe since the Second World War. Srebrenica was not a battlefield misunderstanding, a tragic footnote or another episode in the endless Balkan catalogue of competing grievances. It was genocide.

And yet Serbia continues to struggle with the elementary moral arithmetic of the past. The dead are counted according to nationality, while the perpetrators are measured according to political usefulness. History becomes a supermarket in which governments select whichever facts fit the day's shopping list.

This is where Serbia's European ambitions collide with its domestic politics. Joining the European Union is not simply an economic membership card. It is supposed to represent acceptance of a political culture in which courts matter, minorities possess rights, borders are not sacred excuses for aggression, and historical crimes cannot be repackaged as patriotic achievements whenever elections approach.

Brussels can negotiate chapters, regulations and accession benchmarks. It cannot manufacture historical honesty. Ursula von der Leyen was therefore right to describe the scenes as deeply regrettable. But regret is a rather weak word for what happened. Europe has spent decades insisting that the Balkans must confront the ghosts of the 1990s. Every time those ghosts are dressed in uniforms and greeted as heroes, the European project discovers that the past has not disappeared at all. It has merely been waiting for another political procession.

There is also something profoundly cynical about celebrating Mladić now. The general is safely dead. He cannot embarrass anyone with new revelations. He cannot contradict the mythology being constructed around him. He has become politically convenient precisely because he can no longer speak.

The danger is not that Serbia will suddenly become a dictatorship because thousands attended one funeral. The danger is subtler: that democratic institutions slowly become compatible with the glorification of people those institutions have already judged responsible for atrocities.

Europe should not humiliate Serbia or punish an entire population for the sins of its nationalist extremists. But neither should it pretend that membership negotiations can proceed as though this were merely another disagreement over agricultural subsidies or customs regulations.

A country seeking to join a political union built partly from the ruins of Europe's twentieth-century catastrophes must understand one uncomfortable principle: reconciliation begins where hero worship ends.

Mladić's funeral was supposed to bury a man. Instead, it exposed a country still arguing over whether he deserves to be remembered as a criminal or a hero. That argument is not ancient history. It is Serbia's European test.

Berserk Alert! #119 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

 

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
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AntySaurus Prick #137 #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!

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Fascism in Greece aside of Kasidiaris by Thanos Kalamidas

The problem with the Greek debate over Ilias Kasidiaris is not that people are too alarmed about him. They are not alarmed enough about the larger political disease his return exposes.

Kasidiaris is dangerous. Golden Dawn was not merely another nationalist party with unpleasant manners; its leadership was convicted as members of a criminal organisation, after years in which political violence, racist intimidation and fascist symbolism became part of its public identity. His return to politics deserves vigilance, not nostalgia.

But there is something intellectually dishonest about treating Kasidiaris as though Greek democracy encounters fascism only when fascism arrives from outside the respectable political establishment.

For years, the Greek political system has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to condemn the far right in public while absorbing, accommodating or rehabilitating parts of its political vocabulary and personnel when convenient. That is the contradiction that should make democrats uncomfortable.

The question is not whether Kasidiaris is worse than every politician who has ever occupied a ministerial office. Such comparisons are ultimately a distraction. The question is why the boundaries of democratic respectability have sometimes been drawn so selectively.

Consider Makis Voridis. His political past is not a secret footnote. Before becoming a senior figure in New Democracy and eventually a government minister, he was a prominent figure in Greece's far-right political milieu. Yet the passage from the political fringe to the centre can apparently be accomplished without the centre being asked to explain very much about the journey.

Thanos Plevris presents a different but equally uncomfortable case. His father, Konstantinos Plevris, became notorious for antisemitic and Nazi-associated writings and politics. Thanos Plevris later distanced himself from those positions and condemned antisemitism. That distinction matters. But so does the extraordinary fact that a political family so deeply entangled with Greece's far-right history could ultimately become part of the governing establishment.

And then there are the recurring allegations and controversies surrounding contacts between mainstream conservative politicians and Golden Dawn figures. They have been claims that Dora Bakoyannis secretly negotiated with Kasidiaris over political cooperation when Golden Down was still ‘legal’ and in Parliament; and following Tsipras return and fear, who knows if some in the governing party haven’t thought that time has …arrived again. The point is that the broader history of contacts between establishment politics and the far right is hardly imaginary.

This is where the argument should become uncomfortable. A democracy cannot protect itself merely by pointing at the most obvious fascists and declaring them uniquely toxic. Fascism becomes politically durable when respectable institutions teach citizens that extremism is monstrous in one setting but negotiable in another.

Golden Dawn did not become powerful because Greeks suddenly forgot what fascism was. It became powerful because economic collapse, political rage, immigration fears, institutional distrust and social desperation created an audience for authoritarian politics. Mainstream parties did not create all those conditions but they operated inside them and sometimes competed for the same anxieties.

Kasidiaris understands this. His political opportunity is not created simply by his prison release. It is created by a country in which the far right can repeatedly reinvent itself while the political establishment argues about where, precisely, the line should be drawn constantly moving the red lines..

That is why the comparison that matters is not Kasidiaris versus Voridis, or Kasidiaris versus Plevris. The comparison is between what Greek democracy says fascism is and what Greek politics has sometimes been willing to tolerate from people who came dangerously close to it.

There should be no confusion here: none of this diminishes Kasidiaris's record or the danger posed by a political movement built around authoritarian nationalism and the mythology of Golden Dawn.

It makes the warning larger. The real democratic failure would be to condemn Kasidiaris and then congratulate ourselves while preserving the habits that made his political world normalized and possible. Fascism does not become less dangerous because someone puts on a suit. Sometimes, that is precisely when democracy should pay closer attention.