May 2006

Once again, during the recent revolt against the First Employment Contract, the enthusiasm and dynamism evident on French streets were in marked contrast with the disconcerting silence of French thinkers and writers. The same was true during the November riots in the banlieues. There was a lot of chattering, but few, other than such rare figures as Jean Baudrillard and John Berger, were able to read the events, uncover their deeper significance and suggest what they might portend. With no (...)

Iraq is simultaneously descending into both a civil war and a war of resistance against foreign occupation. The United States has been hoping to exploit the divide between Iraqi patriots and global jihadists, but the Sunni opposition is growing more structured and unified as it adapts to changing conditions, and may transcend those divisions.

Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’athist regime in Syria is looking weaker as it faces heavy pressure from the United States and France, plus domestic opposition. Yet the Ba’ath party has had Syria in its grip for 40 years and has little intention of losing its controlling power.

A bazaar economy has taken over the towns of Algeria, a country that is in the grip of an economic fever. Despite its oil revenues, it cannot pay its public servants properly, other than the police; it has a chronic youth unemployment problem and treasury corruption.

News that Russian oil production will be lower than expected in the next few years and anxieties about Iran’s nuclear ambitions have pushed oil prices well over $70 a barrel, perhaps towards the $100 mark. And the price may never fall again.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said last month that the UNHCR would open an office in Grozny as soon as security permits. The appearance of normalisation implied by his statement is deceptive. The Russians are counting on continued violence, and local resignation.

It’s almost 200 years since the Anglo-American trade was banned: how do historians now view its practices and effects?

US pharmaceutical companies have long known that the potential market for their products is limited by the finite number of sick people; so they have turned to the healthy for further expansion of their markets, using exploitative, fear-inducing advertising techniques.

Each civilisation on earth has taken its own route in the pursuit of knowledge, and interaction between those civilisations has been less frequent than we tend to assume, suggesting that there can be no such thing as universal science on this planet, let alone beyond it.