Thursday, 10th October 2013
In Depth
In Highgate Cemetery, three miles from where I write, Karl Marx's body lies a-mouldering in his grave; and, for so many years, it seemed that his critique of the capitalist system was also safely buried. More ...
What lessons can be drawn from China's spectacular and sustained economic growth? More ...
The way that Russia marked the 15th Anniversary of the end of the USSR, the final events of which took place between the 8th and 31st of December 1991, has caused consternation in the Western media. More ...
The Ma’an News service is a valuable resource. While its TV stations inform and entertain the locals, its news agency (MNA) sends the world 24-hour news from beleaguered Palestine. Viewers of its well-designed website receive minute-by-minute information in Arabic, Hebrew and English, with local news from ten districts in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, accompanied by high quality, and often shocking, photographs. More ...
The greatest successes in industrial development and prosperity of the last fifty years have been produced by state ownership and investment, central planning and regulated monopoly rather than by the 'free market'. More ...
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Current Affairs
by Amena Saleem
The American poet T.S. Eliot wrote that ‘April is the cruelest month’. The phrase springs to mind in April 2013, the month that a new director-general took up his post at the BBC and, within two weeks, had installed a line-up of hardline Zionists at the top of the world’s largest publicly-funded news organization. More ...
by Noah Tucker
The banning of all but seven seconds of ‘Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead’ from airplay by the BBC is not the first time that Yip Harburg’s work has been subject to censorship. Harburg, who wrote all the lyrics and much of the dialogue for The Wizard of Oz, was blacklisted as a communist sympathiser by the Un-American Activities Committee of the US Congress, preventing him from being employed in the American film and television industries from 1951 to 1962. More ...
History
In 2020, eight more precarious years into the future, Australians will mark the 250th anniversary of what many, though not all, regard as their nation’s ‘foundational moment’. This was when, on Sunday, 29 April 1770, a small party of Englishmen first set foot on the shore of what is now Botany Bay. Leading the group was professional navigator James Cook, who captained the Endeavour on commission from the Admiralty. Among those accompanying him was expedition botanist and ‘society man’ Joseph Banks, who paid his own way. More ...
Headlines
At 06.45 on 13 September 1942 the Nazi onslaught on Stalingrad commenced with a bloody vengeance. The sky turned brown from the dust of fragmented buildings, the ground vibrated because of the power of the explosions. The Fascist army's advance continued but faced the most ferocious resistance imaginable. More ...
Britain
Given the current troubles of Britain’s coalition government, it might seem a crying shame from the point of view of David Cameron and George Osborne that they feel unable to announce a fact that would surely be regarded by the public as an excellent piece of economic good news. More ...
International
At least one of the NATO states involved in the 2011 war against Libya used ‘smart-bomb’ components specially imported from Israel to bombard that Arab country. Information on the use of Israeli weaponry against Libya was contained in a report released by the Danish Air Force Tactical Command following a Freedom of Information Act request, and has since been confirmed by General Peter Bartram, who is head of Denmark’s armed forces. More ...
Opinions
I was driving down Central Avenue in my hometown, Cheyenne, Wyoming, when I heard the news that the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez had died. I pulled over and called friends. I hurt from my head to my toes. I have never met Chávez personally, but I feel I have known him for nineteen years. More ...