The Egret A snow-white egret passes our cottage By the Gumbo Limbo and the Traveller trees. With its ballet dancer’s step and mobile neck It reminds me of something…… Ah, yes! Alice playing croquet in Wonderland, Striking the hedgehog with the flamingo’s head. Like Alice’s flamingo the egret’s head moves Restlessly back and forth, In …
After nine months of pandemic punishment, could talk of conflict between former EU allies be less helpful? Yet, days before the deadline for a deal on the terms of the EU/UK divorce, Boris Johnson threatened to deploy warships against French fishing boats in the English channel. The gunboat diplomacy is pantomime more than poker. In …
Ecosystem collapse a risk in one fifth of the world’s countries The spread of intensive farming threatens to jeopardize the world’s chances of meeting the term of the Paris agreement on the climate crisis. Nitrous oxide is given off by the overuse of artificial fertilizers, and by organic sources such as animal manure, and has …
It was a Rand Corporation study showing that, between 1975 and 2018, the equivalent of $2.5 trillion (no, not “billion”!) was transferred annually from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. (In those years, even the 2% to 9%-ers essentially twiddled their financial thumbs.) Such a transfer of wealth, close to $50 trillion, …
Hours after England’s new lockdown measures were announced last Saturday, 700 people crammed into a warehouse outside Bristol for an illegal Halloween rave. Police were called to the event in Yate, Gloucestershire, at 10.30pm, but according to a spokesman, crowds refused to disperse, and several officers sustained minor injuries when party-goers, denied entry to the …
