Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho joins us to discuss his Oscar-nominated film, The Secret Agent, and the history that inspired it. The film is set in the northern Brazilian city of Recife in the 1970s, during the country’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship. ”The Secret Agent is very much about the past, but it’s very much about the past repeating itself through amnesia,” says Mendonça, who draws a comparison between the Cold War-era dictatorship and Brazil’s later years under right-wing Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. This is an excerpt of a longer interview with Mendonça you can watch here.

As Iranian missiles strike military, residential and economic targets in neighboring Gulf states, we speak to Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara in Doha, Qatar. Bishara says Iran’s targeting of U.S. allies in the region may be an Iranian calculation that there is “a cost to be paid for American interests” as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other regional powers are forced to respond to an “Israeli war of choice.” Meanwhile, says Bishara, the U.S. has learned “nothing” from its own history. Not only has the Trump administration “repeated every single false pretext the Bush administration carried or diffused to justify the war against Iraq,” but “this threatens to be a far worse war in its implication for […]

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is now in its fifth day. Following the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Israel has made it clear that it intends to target any official successors. Observers also warn that Israel could soon deploy its “Dahiya doctrine,” a military strategy it first developed in Lebanon that involves carpet-bombing densely populated residential areas. Despite U.S. hopes for a short engagement, however, Iran appears to be settling in for a “war of attrition” against “the biggest military superpower in world history, and the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East,” says scholar Narges Bajoghli. “This could turn into a regional war of a scale that will make the past 25 years of forever wars in the […]

After a strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killed at least 175 people, nearly all young schoolchildren, online reports spread disinformation about the attack, including claims that the Iranian government itself had bombed the school. Journalist Nilo Tabrizy describes how outside reporters have been able to verify the attack despite Iran’s internet blackout and says attempts are still being made to confirm whether the strike is attributable to the U.S. or to Israel.

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