This past week has been a catastrophic seven days that shook America. Some of the debris may have fallen on President Donald Trump. Most importantly, the Trump administration has lost the plot on China. The tragic Memorial Day murder of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, highlights that as much as racial violence…
Rejiggering security arrangements in the Gulf may be a more pressing issue than meets the eye. That is not good news for the Gulf states. It is also bad news for China, which could see the rug pulled out from under its studious effort to remain on the sidelines of the Middle East’s myriad conflicts….
Some eight years ago, I wrote about the outbreak of popular stirring in the Middle East, then labelled the ‘Arab Awakening’. Multiple popular discontents were welling: demands for radical change proliferated, but above all, there was anger – anger at mountainous inequalities in wealth; blatant injustices and political marginalisation; and at a corrupt and rapacious…
With all the protests and anger and violence across the country, a justified discussion about policing has begun on our corporate media airwaves. (I would say the discussion is overdue, but in fact, we’ve had it roughly every three years for the past 40 years.) However, despite all the coverage, a deeper debate sits ignored…
Façade of collegiality The Covid-19 outbreak took by surprise politicians who had lost sight of their primary function: to protect their fellow citizens. Panicked, they turned to a few gurus. In this case the mathematician Neil Ferguson of Imperial College [1] and the physician Richard Hatchett of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), former collaborator of…
The Australian High Court has ruled that correspondence between the Queen and the Governor-General of Australia, her viceroy in the former British colony, is no longer “personal” and the property of Buckingham Palace. Why does this matter? Secret letters written in 1975 by the Queen and her man in Canberra, Sir John Kerr, can now…
