111 510 510 libonline@riphah.edu.pk Contact

Whither Europe?

SHORTLY after Joe Biden and a phalanx of European leaders gathered in Normandy last week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that launched the endgame in the…

Day of reunification

Exactly 34 years ago on October 3, 1990, East Germany and West Germany ended their differences and emerged on the map of the world as the Federal Republic of Germany.…

Deus ex machina

OVERUSED as it may be, ‘revolution’ is the only way to describe what’s happening in Artificial intelligence; OpenAI’s ChatGPT, short for ‘Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer’ has captured our imaginations, with…

Adieu, 2022

FEW will shed tears at the extinction of 2022. It has been a strange, unhappy year for almost everyone. Perhaps the most disappointed is former prime minister Imran Khan. He…

An adieu, overdue

CARL Sagan’s book Cosmos (1960) tells us: “There are some hundred billion (10¹¹) galaxies, each with, on average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as…

Putin’s comeuppance

VLADIMIR Putin was already licking his wounds when he turned up in Samarkand last week for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. Just days earlier, Russian occupying forces in the Kharkiv…

Decolonising the museum

IT is sad that a visit to many of the most famous museums in the world feels like a visit to the treasure trove of a global looter. When one…

European miasma

ON the night of the Swedish election on Sept 11, a 26-year-old politician from the Sweden Democrats hailed its triumph in becoming the nation’s second-biggest parliamentary party by raising one…

Adieu, sweet prince

ZIA Mohyeddin was horizontal the first time I encountered him, reclining on a couch in his dressing room at the Central TV studios in Birmingham. I was there — by…