News reports and images of protests and rebellions from all over the world frequent the print media these days.  From Santiago to Beirut, Algiers to Hong Kong, a wave of popular protests is shaking the world. In all the latitudes, people have gone into revolt against their rulers.  The contexts are obviously very different. Authoritarian regimes as well as neoliberal democracies are targeted. In Algiers and Cairo, the revolt is aimed against a...

The ‘Foreign’ page of every Indian newspaper is replete with images and reports of protests and revolts these days. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy is facing its deepest crisis since the 1930s. On the external front, it is on the defensive, facing a strange combination of democracy and dictatorship on the one hand and the jihadists on the other. It is undermined by a paralysis of institutions that makes it ungovernable...

All over Europe, after the disappearance of the ISIS in October 2017, there is a significant decline in jihadist attacks. Many countries, including France, have lowered their level of vigilance because there is no longer the presence of an agency that plans large-scale fatalities. But this is not the end of jihad. It is a regression, but also a kind of mutation. From almost a quasi-industrial enterprise, like the attacks of November 2015...

For those who still doubt it, the news of this summer (series of heat waves, multiplication of forest fires, cyclones, etc.) is a reminder of what scientists have been saying for almost fifty years: our civilization is facing a global climate crisis endangering the entire planet. Human activities have become the predominant telluric force, our current geological era being described as Anthropocene. The figures projected by organisations such as...

The rusty 7 mm revolver that Van Gogh allegedly used for killing himself with in 1890 has sold for €162,500 ($183,000) in an auction. Is the auctioned pistol really the same weapon the painter had used on July 27, 1890 to kill himself? The pistol, a Lefaucheux, was found in the same field where the artist was shot by a farmer in the 1960s.  It is impossible to confirm but the auctioneer M. Grégoire Veyrès indicated that the identity of the...