By reacting quickly and decisively, by mobilising its public healthcare system and world-leading biotech sector, Cuba has kept contagion and fatalities low. In 2020 Cuba confirmed a total of 12,225 coronavirus cases and 146 deaths in a population of 11.2 million, among the lowest rates in the Western Hemisphere. In November 2020, the airports were opened, leading to a surge with more infections in January 2021 than the whole of the previous year. By 24 March 2021, Cuba had registered fewer than 70,000 cases and 408 deaths. The death rate was 35 per million and the fatality rate was just 0.59% (2.2% worldwide; 2.9% in Britain). More

After 30 years, the government of El Salvador continues to ensure impunity for those responsible for the worst massacre in modern Latin American history, in which 986 people were killed by the Salvadoran Armed Forces. President Nayib Bukele, who promised survivors and families of the victims at the end of 2019 he would collaborate and open the military archives to help bring justice, is currently blocking access to the documents and evidence requested by the judge overseeing the case. More

The claim by military planners that we should look to the wars of the future, rather than the wars of the past, should be treated with suspicion. Such self-inflicted blindness to recent history is convenient because what Britain, echoing America, is proposing to do has failed before. Despite their supposed technological wizardry and the expenditure of vast sums,  the US and Britain never found an answer to the mix of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), booby traps, suicide bombers and snipers that they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. More

What is about Jews and marijuana? That’s what Richard Nixon asked H. R. (Bob) Halderman 50-years ago, on May 26, 1971 to be precise. The White House tapes recorded Nixon saying, “There’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards who is out there to legalize marijuana is Jewish.” Nixon added, “What the Christ is the matter with the Jews.” Like a lot of things that Nixon said, his comments about Jews and marijuana had little if any basis in fact.  More