menu_open
Mahir Ali

Mahir Ali

Dawn

We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

True Brits

THERE are ways in which Kemi Badenoch’s advent as Britain’s opposition leader, at the helm of the Conservative Party, can be seen as a remarkable...

yesterday 50

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Trump or Harris?

A WEEK from today, nervous tension will be spiking within and beyond the US as the results roll in from what has been hyped up as the most...

30.10.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Aspiring dreamers

AMONG the various things that lately have not gone Imran Khan’s way was his predictable elimination from the list of candidates for the post of...

23.10.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Disunited nations

THE inability of the UN to facilitate the primary goal set out in its hopeful charter nearly eight decades ago, “to save succeeding generations from...

16.10.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Beyond Oct 7

IF it is considered impolitic to denounce Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza over the past year without condemning the inhumane crimes committed by...

09.10.2024 80

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Unseen horrors

WHEN yet another Sudanese civil war erupted in April 2023, the then year-old Russian invasion of Ukraine continued to hog the attention of the...

02.10.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Agents of terror

OVER the past week, the Netanyahu regime may have succeeded in its endeavours to provoke a wider war. It isn’t difficult to imagine what the Western...

25.09.2024 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Electoral meddling

“THE American people,” the US attorney general Merrick Garland declared recently, “are entitled to know when a foreign power engages in...

11.09.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Right, wrong & left

LAST Sunday, the state election in Thuringia for the first time propelled an extreme right-wing party to pole position anywhere in Germany since the...

04.09.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Taliban on steroids

THE inspired but abortive effort a century ago by a king and his feminist queen to thrust Afghanistan into their vision of modernity offers a stark...

28.08.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Poking the bear

TWENTY-FOUR years ago, just months into his first term as Russia’s second post-Soviet president, Vladimir Putin was pictured partying at a dacha in...

21.08.2024 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Beyond the javelin

A SINGULAR athletic triumph in Paris triggered spontaneous jubilation in the run-up to Independence Day in a nation that might otherwise have wondered...

14.08.2024 60

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Diplomacy deficit

PAEANS to Joe Biden’s diplomatic skills have been flowing since the fruition of a prisoner exchange between Russia and the West. The deal apparently...

07.08.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Caracas conundrum

THERE was barely a peep from the self-ordained paragons of democratic virtue when Paul Kagame was returned to power in Rwanda two weeks ago with more...

31.07.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

No joy in Dhaka

THERE is a sense of irony in watching tanks and armoured personnel carriers on the streets of Dhaka, defending a government that traces its lineage to...

24.07.2024 80

Dawn

Mahir Ali

After the fall

IT’S emblematic of the current moment in American politics that the incumbent president’s physical and mental health remains a bigger cause for...

17.07.2024 70

Dawn

Mahir Ali

France unbowed?

IN the run-up to last Sunday’s second round of French parliamentary elections, opinion polls and much of the media commentary chiefly focused on...

10.07.2024 70

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Pity the nation

THE Tory devastation in the 1997 UK election was a delight to behold, but it was somewhat blunted by suspicions that New Labour was neither equipped...

03.07.2024 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Assange is free

JULIAN Assange was already on a flight to Australia by the time the news broke early yesterday of a plea deal with the US, whereby he would plead...

26.06.2024 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Whither Europe?

SHORTLY after Joe Biden and a phalanx of European leaders gathered in Normandy last week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings...

12.06.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Modi’s hat-trick

AT the cusp of yesterday, most of his troubles seemed so far away. The published exit polls pointed to a third landslide for Narendra Modi and his...

05.06.2024 80

Dawn

Mahir Ali

World War III?

THE president of Ukraine has lately devoted a great deal of his energy to soliciting international attendance at a supposed peace conference scheduled...

29.05.2024 300

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Unusual trifecta

THERE appears to be no reliable source for the quote that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen, commonly (and possibly...

22.05.2024 60

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Malmö mixtape

SELDOM before has the annual festival of schmaltz and schlock known as the Eurovision Song Contest been subject to so much controversy as it was in...

15.05.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Gaza’s fate

WAKING up yesterday to the news that Hamas had accepted a ceasefire proposal came as a pleasant surprise, but it did not last long. It was accompanied...

08.05.2024 200

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Roll on, Columbia

MUCH to the consternation of the pat­h­e­tically insipid Biden administration as well as its rabidly right-wing Republican opposition, student...

01.05.2024 70

Dawn

Mahir Ali

More ‘Moditva’

THE impressive logistics of India’s nat­io­nal elections inspire considerable internati­onal coverage. This year, the process initiated last...

24.04.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Iran hits back

FOR the first two weeks of this month, the Western media’s main focus was on how Iran might react to an egregious Israeli provocation. On the first...

17.04.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

No joy in Gaza

THE targeted slaughter last week of seven employees of World Central Kitchen (WCK) kicked off an international reaction that would not have occurred...

10.04.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Beyond Bhutto

THE morning of April 4, 1979, lingers in the memory. I woke up to get ready for school, and found my mother red-eyed. Even before she uttered a word,...

03.04.2024 70

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Distant solidarity

IT took almost six months for the UN Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, after the US decided against kiboshing yet another...

27.03.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Russian roulette

A THUMPING majority for Vladimir Putin in his fifth bid for the Russian presidency was a foregone conclusion, even though its size surprised even...

20.03.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Blighted Britain

THE notion that Britain’s royal family represents the superglue that keeps the kingdom united is a gross exaggeration, but the House of Windsor can...

13.03.2024 80

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Berlin’s blind spot

ABOUT 10 days ago, a joint Palestinian-Israeli creative endeavour titled No Other Land, chronicling the struggle for survival in Masafer Yatta —...

06.03.2024 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Hawks in charge

LAST Sunday, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old senior airman in the US Air Force, set up a video stream and, outside the Israeli embassy in Washington,...

28.02.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Parallel travesties

AT the time of writing, almost five days after the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was reported to have suddenly died in an Arctic penal...

21.02.2024 60

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Quo vadis?

THE initial reaction was shock as independents affiliated with the PTI emerged as the dominant force in the next parliament. It was, after all, widely...

14.02.2024 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Darkness at Noon?

RECENT events have made it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to take tomorrow’s election seriously. It’s not just the rat-a-tat sentencing...

07.02.2024 60

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Israel über alles

ONCE the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague endorsed the substance of South Africa’s case against Israel (albeit not in its entirety)...

31.01.2024 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Genocidal collusion

WHETHER he’s trying to crack a joke or pretending to be serious, Joe Biden’s octogenarian visage is permanently contorted into a grimace. That may...

24.01.2024 80

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Lenin’s legacy

AN intriguing triptych included in Iqbal’s second volume of verse, Baal-i-Jibreel, envisages Vladimir Lenin in the presence of God, explaining why...

17.01.2024 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

One of a kind

ACROSS almost six decades of investigative journalism, John Pilger unsparingly torchlit many of what George W. Bush described as “the darkest...

10.01.2024 60

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Election year

AROUND 40 countries representing almost half the world’s population will either elect new rulers or endorse existing ones in the year ahead. This...

03.01.2024 70

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Obliterating Gaza

IT took several days of diplomatic negotiations for the Security Council to come up with a sufficiently bland Gaza resolution that the US would not...

27.12.2023 80

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Weasel words

IT took 28 years of UN-sponsored climate conferences for one of them to even acknowledge the primary source of the planet’s woes. That was enough...

20.12.2023 90

Dawn

Mahir Ali

A people’s poet

“WE live in a world where they say we communicate more, but the world stayed silent when slave trade was making money/ The world stayed silent when...

13.12.2023 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

Deadly diplomacy

NO one who lived anywhere in the world through the 1970s could ignore Henry Kissinger as he bestrode the world like a colossus, not so much as the...

06.12.2023 100

Dawn

Mahir Ali

1164759ff8796459848bbce99140faff