“The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth … If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. The theory of our Constitution is that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market . . . The First Amendment itself ensures the right to respond to speech we do not like, and for good reason. Freedom of speech and thought flows not from the beneficence of the state but from the inalienable rights of the person … Society has the right and civic duty to engage in open, dynamic, rational discourse.”
– United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 724 (2012).
Toate societățile civilizate, în ultimele două secole mai ales și, în unele cazuri, de la Renaștere încoace, s-au îngrijit atent de educația membrilor lor. Educația este un set de teorii și de practici prin care se transmite experiența de viață a generațiilor adulte și cultura către generațiile de copii și tineri, încât aceștia să fie pregătiți pentru integrarea lor în comunitate.
The retreat of Russia’s forces from the Kharkiv district marks the most significant defeat for Russia since the start of war in Ukraine. The conflict however, is far from over argues Tchantouridze, Putin will now seek to decimate Ukraine’s economic and military infrastructure in a war of attrition, knowing that if Russia incur and further losses in the Black Sea and Kherson, they could lose more than just the war.
It appears that calm has returned to Iraq after the reported intervention of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s chief and widely respected Shia cleric. In recent weeks, violence had occurred in and near parliament, which has been unable to implement last October’s election results. The clashes involved demonstrators and armed forces loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the leading candidate in the elections, and militias loyal to a loose array of rival Shia political parties calling themselves the Coordination Framework.
Iraq is facing one of its worst political crises in years. Normally formed via elite political consensus, more than 11 months after Iraq’s October 2021 parliamentary elections, the government has yet to be formed, the longest such impasse since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion reset the political order. Despite calls for dialogue, neither side seems willing to make mutually acceptable concessions. On Aug. 29 bloody street battles erupted in Baghdad and then in southern Iraq, leaving more than 30 dead and many more injured. Violence has stopped, for now, but the political crisis is far from over, even if superficial solutions may be found in the interim. Iraqis anxiously await the end of the Arba’een holiday on Sept. 17 to see what will happen next.
On Aug. 22, the northeastern Syrian city of al-Hasakah was inundated with leaflets condemning creeping Iranian influence in the area. The printed messages were plastered around several highly sensitive locations in the city center, including the local branch of the Ba’ath Party, the neighborhoods of al-Matar and al-Mahatah, as well as near the Great Mosque and market streets. Known colloquially as the “security square,” this area is under the control of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), other regime security branches, including the Military Intelligence Directorate, as well as the National Defense Forces (NDF), a pro-government militia. Each of these groups has come under Iranian influence since the start of the Syrian war and today provides shelter for Iranian militias in the city and throughout the wider province.
Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine renewed international experts’ focus on Moscow’s earlier military intervention in Syria, launched in 2015, which often became framed as a “testing ground” for the weapons and tactics it now employs against Ukrainian cities. Certainly, direct military action of the type seen on the Ukrainian battlefield — bombing campaigns, assaults on urban areas, drone surveillance, and artillery support — had also played a key role in stunting and eventually rolling back rebel gains in Syria. But crucially, the Russian forces backing Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime also understood the importance of state-building efforts: chiefly, rebuilding the broken Syrian security forces into more coherent, effective fighting units.
One thing is for sure. Abbas will not tell his audience at the UN that members of his ruling Fatah faction are running wild in the West Bank, where they are carrying out terrorist attacks against Palestinian activists and Palestinian journalists as well as Israelis on an almost daily basis.
Syrian and Russian forces attacked the training camps of Syrian armed rebel groups in the northwestern province of Idlib on Wednesday, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported. The camps were targeted by Russian warplanes and Syrian missiles. An unspecified number of rebel fighters, including advisers and trainers from abroad, were killed or wounded in the coordinated Syrian-Russian strikes. SANA said the foreign trainers were teaching local rebels how to use drones in attacks on Syrian troops, and that the rebels’ positions, vehicles, and drones were destroyed during the attack.
The Wagner Group – a Russian State-backed private military company (PMC) – has mounted a bloody campaign across Mali since December 2021, when the country’s ruling military junta contracted its support to counter the growing Salafi-jihadi threat posed by Al-Qaeda’s Sahelian affiliate, the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM), and the Islamic State’s Sahel Province (ISIS).
