June 2015

Demonstrations, participation in elections and the exercise of power are political activities with a common characteristic: the working classes are moving away from them or feel excluded from them. When millions of people in France showed their solidarity on 11 January with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, there was a marked contrast between middle-class mobilisation and the smaller numbers of working-class and young people from deprived areas who turned out. Popular protest has (...)

Banks are dictating terms to the elected government of Greece, overruling the lives and wishes of its citizens for the benefit of a few at home and abroad.

The Conservative Party didn’t win the UK election. The Labour Party lost it, especially in Scotland, which is going its own political way towards nationalist social democracy.

NAFTA was going to enrich consumers, workers and farmers in the US, Mexico and Canada. A minute percentage of the very wealthiest gained — everybody else lost massively.

Relations are beginning to normalise between Cuba and the US — last month a ferry service began from Florida, the first for more than 50 years. But the new Cuba may be a less stable society.

The EU in April accused Gazprom — Europe’s main external gas supplier — of unfair pricing. This challenge to the state-owned energy giant has further heightened tensions with Russia.

Despite EU patronage, Kosovo is not working as a country, and corruption is rife even within the international mission to establish rule of law.

The decades when the continent couldn’t raise major funds on ordinary commercial markets are over, but there are still worries about over-indebtedness.

Conspiracists are just trying to construct — and understand — the story of what is happening to them, while lacking the necessary information to do the job.

Latin America got used to claiming the US was secretly behind all its problems. In many cases, that turned out to be entirely true.

Illogical conspiracy theories spread quickly across the Arab world, and though they can easily be disproved, persist at all levels of society.

Despite the many years of intense scrutiny since 9/11, conspiracy theorists have clung tenaciously to their theories.

Conspiracies have been a plotline in popular fiction for at least 200 years — a simple way to explain the confused narrative of history, and to give impersonal forces personal meaning.

Tests by social psychologists aim to discover what makes people believe in conspiracy theories, and the biases and flawed thinking that underpin them.

The by-products of aluminium extraction have been poisoning the Mediterranean for almost 20 years. But the closure of the plant that produces them would cost jobs in an underemployed region.

The women of what used to be East Germany miss their old equality, independence and excellent childcare provision.

Jay Shafer was the leader of a very small homes concept in the US that never quite became a movement. It seemed for a while like an answer to housing shortages.