Authoritarian governments all over the world have latched onto a great way of stopping unwelcome criticism and subversive thought – suspending data services, phone calls, texting and participation in social media. As internet penetration has surged during the past decade, especially in the developing world, so have attempts to switch off the flow of information. …
Putin is now claiming that Poland invaded Russia at the start of the Second World War and that the Poles and Nazis amounted to the same thing! Could this just be a joke in bad taste? It is , in any case, total fake news. Stalin signed the Stalin Ribbentrop pact expecting to acquire a …
For years people have been complaining about Cyprus’s “golden passport” scheme. Launched in 2013, it offers citizenship to anyone investing €2m in Cypriot property, giving 4,000 members of the global mega-rich residency, voting rights and a back door into Europe. Earlier this year, President Nicos Anastasiades reacted angrily to claims Cyprus was abusing the practice …
To The Sunday Times In 1960s Oxford I would see Cecil Rhodes’s statue, think how wrong he was and walk on. That is life in an open, tolerant country: bits of our history are sticking up everywhere, and we are free to admire, condemn or laugh at them. I prefer that to a country in …
Xinjiang, China China has destroyed and built over scores of traditional burial grounds belonging to the Uighur people in the northwestern Xinjiang province, as part of what critics claim is a ruthless campaign to wipe out the history and cultural identity of the region’s indigenous Muslim population. Satellite images published last week showed flattened earth …
From The Guardian Last year Mexico registered 35,964 murders, an increase of three times the previous year. Only a tiny fraction of crimes committed are solved, and increasingly ordinary people are taking the law into their own hands, specifically, 174 times last year, lynching suspects wherever they can find them. Citizens are frustrated by incompetent …
From Tomgram, the site that comments on the defence industry: “Lockheed Martin Remains Top Gun in the Pentagon’s Cockpit “How are you with numbers? I can deal with $1.5 million. I think I can even imagine $1.5 billion, a sum a thousand times greater. But how about a million times greater: $1.5 trillion? That happens …
Continue reading ‘The ultra-costly, underwhelming F-35 Fighter’ »
For ten years of my early life I went to compulsory chapel every day of the week while at school. This is what I learned about Christianity, as preached buy the moderate Church of England: Christianity means love your neighbour, forgive your enemies, help the old, the hurt and the sick, be unkind to no …
Indian-administered Kashmir remains under an unprecedented lockdown, subject to a curfew and without phone and internet links. It followed the announcement that India’s only Muslim-majority state would lose its autonomous status. Article 370 of India’s constitution, in force since 1949, guaranteed Jammu and Kashmir the right to make its own laws in all internal matters, …
The Guardian, on 7 August, ran an interesting article on the “border” between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The hard border is not currently there because of the terms of the Good Friday agreement, underpinned by the fact that both the UK and Ireland are EU states. If Britain leaves the EU with no …
From the New York Times: Many of the people who have worked for President Trump have ended up “diminished” or humiliated in some way. To that long list we can now add a new name: John Bolton. Trump’s national security adviser won the role by impressing the president with his regular bellicose contributions to Fox …
Continue reading ‘A humiliating way to treat an old warmonger’ »
To The Times Nick King is right to point out that “small and family businesses make up 99% of the UK’s business population and create over three-quarters of new jobs”. Moreover, most of these businesses are also domestic-only and therefore do not trade with the EU, yet are still bound by its restrictive regulatory regime. …
Unless there is a sudden and unexpected outbreak of patriotism and seriousness, today’s the day Boris Johnson will assume the title of Prime Minister of the UK. There have been some pretty terrible rulers of the country, but you have to go back to King John, Edward II, Henry VI or Charles I to find …
Senior members of the United Kingdom’s ruling Conservative party are so concerned about the country leaving the European Union without a deal that they are planning to go over the head of the new Prime Minister and appeal directly to the Queen. Fears are growing among politicians that if and when Boris Johnson becomes PM …
Continue reading ‘Dragging the Queen into the Brexit farce?’ »
The shoddy, shabby treatment of the. British Ambassador to Washington raises the immediate question: who leaked his very accurate assessment of Trump? My favourite explanation is that the Foreign Office computer system was hacked by an insider with a view of getting Darroch replaced – by Nigel Farrage. Who would want this and why? Principally, Boris Johnson (an …
Continue reading ‘Ambassador Darroch’s unresolved resignation’ »
“Jesters and satirists have always been valued for speaking truth to power. But now they’re winning office themselves. When comedian Beppe Grillo joked his way into Italian politics a decade ago, he seemed a one-off. Turns out, he was a “harbinger of things to come”. Since then, Tiririca – an actual clown – has become …
“In Britain and the US a deep crisis of conservatism has been building since the end of the Reagan and Thatcher governments. It is a crisis of competence, of intellectual energy and coherence, of electoral effectiveness, and – perhaps most serious of all – of social relevance.”. (The Guardian, 28 May 2019). If this is …
I don’t want to bore non-Brits with too many comments on Brexit, existential though it is. But I would like to tell a short story. My wife and I were recently walking round an ancient Greek temple in Sicily when a man, who I had never seen before in my life, approached me, and, with his …
Epicurus counseled us to avoid politics and politicians, and watching the antics of politicians in the US, the UK (and, come to think of it the majority of other nations ) he was right. But we are experiencing another attack of world-wide irrational rage and lust for careless and cruel destruction last seen in the …
Support for remaining in the EU is above 80% in most EU countries. Asked how they would vote in an in-out referendum, 94% of people in Luxembourg said “in”, as did 92% of people in Portugal, and 91% in Ireland and the Netherlands. In the UK, the poll found that 55% want to remain, making …
Continue reading ‘As we await the results of the EU Parliamentary elections…..’ »
