In a highly confrontational address to the UN Security Council, Russian Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia accused the European Union and foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas of deliberately escalating the Ukraine conflict and preparing for a major war with Moscow. Dismissing … Read More »
In response to my post of March 21 – Why are America’s rulers allowing this? – American writer and scholar Ed Curtin emailed to say: Trump is not an anomaly except with his mouth, which is planned. He is carrying … Read More »
I know the feeling, Dr Shola. Unlike Tucker I do “hate Israel” just as I hated that other apartheid ethno-settler colony, South Africa. Unlike Tucker I don’t believe in the last analysis that Israel, under Bibi or any other leader, … Read More »
* Liberals temperamentally disinclined to distinguish social conservativism from creeping fascism will welcome the end of Viktor Orbán’s sixteen years as Hungary’s prime minister. So too will those who fondly believe the EU a benign and democratic entity. Me, I side … Read More »
With so much going down in and around the Persian Gulf, few of us noticed, let alone paused to make sense of, Israel’s airstrikes last month on the Iranian port of Bandar Anzali: eight hundred miles north of the Hormuz … Read More »
In the Guardian two days ago, Peter Beaumont asked why Israel is raining terror on Lebanon. What was the point of Israel’s surprise mass strikes on Lebanon that killed more than 300 people and drew widespread international condemnation? Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other … Read More »
Two nights at the in-laws’ beautiful house in Keswick saw me on Derwentwater’s shores on a wet Good Friday. Here’s me looking southward across the bay beyond Friar’s Crag … … southwest from the same spot, into a Borrowdale I … Read More »
Hind Rajab was a five year old Palestinian whose last days and hours were spent trapped with her murdered family in a car under Israeli fire as, acting on IDF evacuation orders, they tried to flee their home in Gaza’s … Read More »
Guardian, April 8 2026 * So, Persian civilisation won’t be ending quite yet. I’m featuring four reactions – with a fifth likely later today – to this morning’s news. Having had no time to gather my own thoughts, I add … Read More »