New Internationalist

Leicester students to show solidarity with Palestine in hunger strike

Students at the University of Leicester are protesting in support of Palestinians in Gaza by going on a hunger strike according to a Leicester Action for Palestine statement seen by the Leicester Gazette. This hunger strike follows a previous occupation of Attenborough Tower in November, which resulted in 11 arrests.

Is Britain complicit in West Papua violence?

The Indonesian military has been accused of carrying out a wave of brutal extra-judicial killings and torture in West Papua in recent months. The Workers for West Papua campaign has highlighted the complicity of countries like Britain, Australia, the US and others in the violence, calling on workers in Britain

Our books editor on what to read in 2025

As X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, continues to degenerate, so too does the quality of its dominant discourse. This week, a thread proposing that classic works of literature should be re-written to be ‘accessible’ to young people went viral. Starting to feel like a big barrier to undergrads

Surviving a massacre in Myanmar

By Ahtaram Shin The sun was setting over Tamay Chaung village in Rakhine State, Myanmar, when 10-year-old Robina Bi Bi heard the sound of explosions. Her father had gone to the paddy fields to bring the cattle home, and her mother was somewhere near the village. But that evening in

Kazakhstan’s shrinking lakes

Lake Balkhash, Kazakhstan’s largest lake, is facing a crisis that threatens its very existence. Increased economic activity in China’s Xinjiang province, where the Ille River – which provides 80 per cent of the water to Balkhash – originates, is reducing water flows. This, combined with increased evaporation due to climate

Climate repression in Canada

In the early hours of 22 October two environmental activists scaled the Jacques-Cartier bridge in Montreal, a vast steel structure over 340 feet tall and 9,000 feet long. The third busiest bridge in Canada and primary point of access to the island, the crossing was shut down for several

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COP16 sidelines Indigenous voices

Building a united front in Eastern Europe

As the Czech government seeks to balance EU climate targets with fears over energy insecurity following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, deep mining continues in the country’s north – though for how long is another matter. In 2015, activists formed Limity Jsme My (‘We Are the Limits’) to protest

On Syria

In the years since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, the country has been slowly drifting away from the mainstream media spotlight. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, Turkish-backed opposition forces declared Syria liberated from the 24-year rule of President Bashar al-Assad as they surged into the

The war on drugs is a ‘war against women and children’

More than 20 years since Amy Case King served her last prison sentence for drug-related charges in the US, the conviction still affects her.  ‘Criminalization is more harmful in the long-term because it doesn’t address the underlying drug use,’ she says. ‘The impact lingers long after the completed sentence.

Israel is 'waging a war on our olive trees'

After the first rainfall of autumn, Salah Abu Ali announced the harvest of one of the world’s oldest olive trees in al-Walaja, a Palestinian farming village between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. He spread red mats around the enormous gnarled trunk, fetched wooden ladders to reach the high branches and gathered

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PHOTO ESSAY: Panama's sinking islands

Under a new finance goal adopted at the COP29 climate summit last week, wealthy nations have agreed to channel at least $300 billion a year to accelerating climate action in developing countries by 2035. UN climate chief Simon Stiell described the new finance goal as 'an insurance policy for

Yanomami Women Lead the Charge Against Illegal Mining in the Amazon

In the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, a powerful movement is taking shape. Indigenous Yanomami women, once sidelined in their own communities, are now at the forefront of a battle to save their ancestral lands from the ravages of illegal gold mining. Earlier this year, under the vibrant lights

The fossil fuel ‘superprofits’ that could fund climate action

More than one trillion dollars in ‘superprofits’ from fossil fuel companies should be used to fund climate change mitigation efforts in the majority world, energy experts say. According to research published in Climate Policy this month, 93 of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies raked in a whopping $1,

Argentinian President Milei to answer for regressive social policies

Argentinian president Javier Milei was summoned to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) last week to answer for his administration's regressive social policies since his election last year. Lawyers, human rights activists, unions and NGOs filed complaints against the self-described 'anarcho-capitalist' to the Commission, which

Narva's cultural revival

Residents of Estonia's third-largest city, Narva, are tired of being called ‘the second Crimea’. The national government has looked at the border city’s nearly exclusively Russian-speaking population through a geopolitical lens since Estonia regained independence in 1991. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, most of Europe

Aid workers in Lebanon prepare for winter

Syrian refugees in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley are facing an increasingly dire situation. Already at the back of the line for aid, these communities are now confronting the threat of a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. 'The situation is very bad here, we have nothing', says one

Political power play leaves Bolivians short of food and fuel

‘The never-ending queues for fuel, the waste and scarcity of food, the rising prices — the bloqueos are affecting the lives of all Bolivians,’ says Carla Torres, a café worker from the capital city of La Paz. Torres' words reflect the increasingly dire situation across the Andean country marred by

How Philippines Urban Poor networks are confronting housing injustice

A Filipino network representing urban poor families in the city of Cebu is celebrating several recent victories including securing housing for over 160 families, successfully negotiating to improve street lighting and sanitation, and settling a case that holds the city accountable to relocating families it recently evicted. After nearly three

'They burn so that we don't return'

Croatian border police are burning migrants’ personal belongings before illegally pushing them back into Bosnia. These brutal, underhand tactics have been adopted to deter migrants from attempting to enter the country and the European Union – and to remove their ability to try again. According to a new report from the

Taking on India’s tiger ‘conservation cartel’

‘The kind of conservation being done in the name of Project Tiger is wrong – it is not serving the people, the forest, nor the wildlife,’ Rajan tells me over the phone from Odisha in eastern India. Rajan is a non-Indigenous member of the Community Network Against Protected Areas (CNAPA), a

'The cloud is our problem because we are part of the cloud'

Aurora Gomez remembers when her family lost their rural land in central Spain to an airport back in 2008. The Ciudad Real government made lofty promises of economic benefits for communities long beset by high unemployment, only for the airport to be sold in a bankruptcy auction in 2015.   Today,

Could you be eating conflict tomatoes?

Chances are, if you’ve bought tomatoes from a British or European supermarket recently, they will be labelled as originating from Morocco. But what the label doesn't say is that they could have actually come from Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that Morocco has occupied since 1973.

Could a Housing First model solve Ukraine's homelessness crisis?

As Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine enters its third year, a crisis of homelessness is emerging across the country. New research from UK-based charity Depaul International shows a sharp rise in homelessness in Ukraine, with 22 per cent of those sleeping rough becoming homeless as a direct consequence

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Currents is a brand-new newsletter series from New Internationalist made up of short dispatches and under-reported stories from across the globe.