Category: News

A UN Human Rights Council report reveals the shocking level of poverty in the United States. In an interview on Democracy Now with Philip Alston, author of the report, it was mentioned that the US is the only country in the world where the overall life expectancy is decreasing.

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Elimination is the keyword that runs through many of the atrocious tales that assail us from around the world. Elimination is a solution to no problem. The wish to eliminate others as the source of our problems is based on a wildly false premise,...

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Bombs are never an answer to problems, no more than guns are. Repeatedly resorting to weapons as a solution to complex, conflictual situations should not be seen as a sign of strength or intelligence. It is an admission of weakness, of inability, of failure, of lack of imagination, even of insanity...

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While people drool over the sex scandals of the US president, more pressing and life-threatening issues go unattended... [Read More]

“We were always taught from a very early age to be the change we wish to see in the world…” Elijah Abraham, student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school... [Read More]

Brexit: what better illustration of how a new word can become the vehicle for so much wishful thinking, so many fantasies and such terrible nightmares, as well as a festering breeding-ground for divisive thinking and extreme ideologies. First of all, there was a vote. A referendum. Living as I do [Read More]

Democracy Now is broadcasting all this week from the climate summit in Bonn. In this extract, we see the protest of climate activists from the We the People movement against the one and only session organised at the summit by the Tr*ump administration ... [Read More]

Seen from abroad this rabid attachment to guns, in which individuals proudly stockpile deadly weapons, despite the slaughter gun-possession leads to verges on collective madness. When are Americans going to have the courage to stand up and say "No!" to guns?... [Read More]

As Trump criticises the mayor of San Juan, how I wish that I could banish the man and his cronies to the most remote and devastated part of Puerto Rica.

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Climate breakdown, not climate change. The words we use to discuss an issue like the impact of climate on the world have an important effect on the way we communicate and the way we understand what is happening. George Monbiot underlines this fact in an article entitled Natural Language saying: If we want people to engage with the living world, we should stop using such constipated terms to describe our relationship to it. ...

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Enough is enough. The violence has to stop! Eight-year-old Aseel Tareq Abu Oun was killed after being rammed by an Israeli settler's car, near Furush Beit Dajan area, east of the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The girl was leaving a supermarket with a friend when she was struck and killed in broad daylight in front of her father. In a time of wide-spread violence and rampant disregard for life, it is so easy to banalise a death here and a murder there. Aseel Tareq Abu Oun was not just another victim. Every life matters! It is our responsibility to shout that from the roof tops...

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Hurricane Harvey and climate change denial - just one more recipe for disaster. Who said climate change didn't exist? How is it possible to be so blind or short-sighted when proof is screaming at you from Texas as well as from many other places around the world? It's a crime to deny such massive devastation and prolonged hardship especially of the less well-off with the short-term goal of filling the coffers of a limited number of people... [Read More]

The Guardian has published an interview with Felicity Lawrence, recent recipient of the Orwell Prize for investigative journalism. Here is how the introduction to the interview begins: Felicity Lawrence has reported on some of the most challenging issues facing the modern world, from corporate power – especially in the food system – to migration, the re-emergence of slavery, climate change, and global tax avoidance. ... [Read More]

Devil's Bargain. Striking book by Joshua Brown about the relationship between Bannon and Trump and the frightening ideas that underlie and drive Bannon's action behind the Trump campaign and subsequent presidency... [Read More]

The White House admits Trump hung out with Putin at the end of an official dinner with heads of state at G19+1. According to a report in the Guardian, they sat apart and out of earshot and had an animated conversation assisted only by Putin's translator... [Read More]

How Brexit blokes do business: with no papers but also no women, at least that's the impression this photo gives of the core negotiators... [Read More]

Not scared to be strong! Miracles performed by Cold Play and Big Sean... [Read More]

Beyond the question of the responsibility of major corporations in funding research to further their vested interests ... [Read More]

If the Trump administration gives  Internet access providers the right to pick and chose how they grant access to the Internet, it opens the door to partitioning the Net between haves and have-nots, with ultra high-speed broadband services for the rich and pitifully slow Internet, if any access at all, for the poor and marginalised... [Read More]

Naomi Klein's book, No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics. is thought-provoking, inspiring and extremely moving... [Read More]

This car roared so loud even though it was driving the wrong way into the car park. It sounded like the garage forgot to re-install the exhaust pipe after the last tuning. Maybe it was that noise that made the driver use two spaces to park. Some might say it demonstrates an inability to park correctly. I suspect it was not a question of failing dexterity but rather an exaggerated sense of place in the world. There's a lot of it going on... [Read More]

By delegitimising media and expert opinion, and thus removing any possible checks and balances, it could be argued that Forty-Five produces political discourse as if it were publicity... [Read More]

Time and time again partisans of Brexit reject calls for caution and a more measured stance about leaving the EU by attacking the person and their past. Rather than consider the wisdom of John Major's words they portray him as an embittered loser. Exactly the same tactic was used when Tony Blair spoke out about Brexit... [Read More]

This ad proclaims that you can meet the characters of a well-known film in this tiny railway station. As a marketing concept, it is already a thing of the past. Now the biggest television show on Earth has invaded all our lives. It's on our TVs, on the radio, in all our newspapers worldwide and in every nook and cranny of the Internet, every day and all day long. It's in our conversations and maybe in our nightmares. The Forty-fiver Show. You are probably sick of it, if not worried sick by it...

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There's a key lesson to be learnt by Americans from the disastrous Brexit process. Theresa May wanted to bypass parliament and dictate her own path but the judiciary said otherwise. The right-wing press tried to shoot the judges down, but the fact remains that an individual does not govern alone in our countries... [Read More]

Météo Suisse has announced we are in a for a big storm this evening along the Jura mountains. It has been code-named Trumpette. This last snippet of information was unofficially provided by the official Russian Disinformation Agency under the leadership of an ex-KGB boss known to be lurking in the Kremlin... [Read More]

With hindsight, the US election result seems evident, even if we hoped/prayed for something else. Unfortunately, viable alternatives were not on the cards. The cracks that have been appearing in representative democracy (including the sterile deadlock of a polarised two-party system in the US) and the related bureaucracy have generated so much dissatisfaction that there was a giant, but partly hidden, reservoir of votes up for the grabs... [Read More]

Hinkley Point: a black hole through which Britain will disappear in a cloud of invisible toxic smoke while the Chinese and French tiptoe away... [Read More]

Many of the pictures of Forty-five* published in the press, not to mention his unpredictability and his ravings on stage, point to some form of mental trouble. Yet American psychiatrists have shied away from speculating on his sanity or lack of it, afraid of coming away smattered from a messy combat, as if a diagnosis at a distance would undermine their credibility, putting them on a par with astrologers... [Read More]

Research showed that, breathed in through the nose, nano particles of Magnetite (an oxide of iron) entered the brain via the olfactory nerve. These nano particles are thought to play a role in degenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer... [Read More]

Have they become so dumb, so deaf, so blind, so hopelessly unfeeling, so caught up in petty squabbles if not bloody skirmishes, wary of friends and foes alike, so enamoured of their own words that they are ensnared in their own bullshit, so worried about sinking ratings, their eyes riveted on opinion polls and the rumblings of social media,... [Read More]

It's almost as if the candidate is seeing how far he can go before he gets booted out on his ears, except that the more outrageous the things he does and says, the more despicable they are, the more the mass of his supporters clamour for him to do more and ultimately be elected. [Read More]

The Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It brigade are at work again. Boris the Johnson is quoted as saying to press in the US: “Brexit means us being more outward looking, more engaged, more energetic, more enthusiastic on the world stage than ever before.” There is a very precise word for such nonsense, bullshit... [Read More]

Why so much disrespect directed towards politicians? The buffoons, the liars, the twisters-of-truth, the fear-mongers, the hate-makers, the racists, the wall-builders, the divide-and-conquerors, the off-with-her-headers, the its-their-faulters, the power-hungry führers, the mad hatters, the control freaks, the drug-pedlars-for-sportlers, the you-know-who-I-meaners... [Read More]