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Issue 526 of New Internationalist

Reader-owned global journalism

July-August 2020

The Kurds: Betrayed again

While the world’s attention is on the Covid-19 pandemic, Turkey is ramping up its war against the Kurds – in Syria, in Iraq and in Turkey itself. Will the West, once again, wring its hands and do nothing to help the friends who led the fight against Islamic State?

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Included in this issue

United Nations SDG Goals Annual Gathering, Opening Plenary on Day Two 21-23 March 2018, Photo Credit: Neil Baynes/Flickr

Could the SDGs deliver on their promises?

We are a third of the way towards 2030, the target date for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Gary Rynhart and Jan...

Rajasthan, India On the way to Pushkar Women in the countryside

Abandoning the rural poor

The deadly neglect of India’s rural communities must end, writes Nilanjana Bhowmick.

Where we would have been: Fridays for Future activists leave placards outside the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany, as an alternative climate protest. Kay Nietfeld/DPA/Alamy Live News

Temperature check

Aruna Chandrasekhar on how climate activism has kept going in a time of isolation.

Deputy Minister Luwellyn Landers attends inauguration of Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina, 19 January 2019 by GovernmentZA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

The lies and the liars

Nanjala Nyabola grapples with the challenge of misinformation and disinformation.

Smuggling is necessary but dangerous work for these Kurdish boys. Many are killed every year by Iranian border patrols. Rahman Hassani/Alamy

Shoot first

Iran’s Kurds are suffering in silence. But for how much longer?

The face of Abdullah Öcalan frequently appears on banners at pro-Kurdish demonstrations around the world, like this one in Berlin. Jan Scheunert/Zuma/Alamy

Mandela of the Middle East?

How did a once hardcore Marxist-Leninist and nationalist guerrilla leader come to develop a politics of participatory democracy...

Back to work: garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, after factories re-opened in May. Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse

A clamour to return to the status quo after Covid-19 would be bad news for people and the planet, argues Richard Swift. We may...

Dr Asamte Fidel is one of the local Sierra Leonean doctors working at Connaught Hospital. The hospital was on the frontline of the Ebola epidemic when it hit in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Credit: Simon Davis/DFiD

First Ebola, then Covid-19

Four years ago, New Internationalist travelled to West Africa to hear the stories of communities in recovery from the deadly...

Former World Bank president Jim Yong Kim sold $320 million in pandemic bonds during the Ebola crisis. The bonds, however, did not pay out, even though over 2,000 people have died. Credit: WikiCommons

Broken bonds

Liam Taylor on the World Bank’s waning reputation in pandemic response.

Leasing a flying ICU to go between Belém and Brasília costs over $6,794 – or 63 months’ wages of a person within the poor 50 per cent.

First class patients

In Brazil, the rich, who infected the poor, are now buying ICU flights for themselves.

What if…drug patents were scrapped?

Husna Rizvi makes a vital suggestion.

Women in Qamishlo, the de-facto capital of Rojava, protest against a Turkish-Russian deal that threatens them and the gains of their revolution. Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty

Unbowed

Turkey is bent on extinguishing a beacon of women’s liberation in northern Syria. But the women of Rojava are not giving up,...

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