Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 A chapter from A Critical Political Economy of the Modern Middle East

“ Marine Le Pen, champion of the French far right, has come within reach for the first time of beating President Macron in next year’s election, according to a poll. The Harris survey, premised on a replay of the run-off in the 2017 election, has alarmed the president’s supporters and the political establishment because it suggests that   Ms Le Pen   is close to breaching the “glass ceiling” of French politics. The barrier was based on the longstanding assumption that an absolute majority of voters would never back a far-right candidate. If the May 2022 run-off were staged now, Ms Le Pen would have 48 per cent of the vote, with Mr Macron on 52 per cent, according to a poll carried out online on January 19...” Source: The Times UK

 

 كيف يخلق النظام من شعبه بركانا؟

Eight politicians from Germany's left-wing party – Die Linke – have signed a  solidarity statement  calling for the immediate release of all political detainees, which explicitly highlights the fate of six detained leftist activists, journalists and trade unionists.  The campaign by German left-wing politicians, in response to Sisi’s reprisals against the labour movement, has coincided with a wave of strikes and protests in Egypt’s steel industry. Germany’s Die Linke Campaign to release political prisoners in Egypt

“With  Charles VIII’s siege of Naples, not one scourge but two entered Italy. Before 1494, Syphilis probably did not exist in Europe; returnees from Columbus’ first voyage from America, who had contracted the disease in America, very likely introduced the disease to Spain. Spanish mercenaries at the siege of Naples (1494-5) suffered an epidemic that almost certainly syphilis , whence it spread throughout the continent. As the plague spread, the French called it ‘Neapolitan disease’, while Neapolitans preferred to call it ‘the French disease’.” —Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States – AD 990-1992 , 1992, p. 77 “A number of scholars have commented on how diseases ‘becomes adjectival’ since the late 1980s when Susan Sontag first highlighted how epidemics become a proxy for social disorder when metaphors are applied to them and ‘the horror of the disease is imposed on other things’. More recently, in a book that examined the legacies of plague in literature, theory and film,

  Colour posters since 1930s