Man-made canals like Panama and Suez face unprecedented challenges from extreme weather patterns and geopolitical tensions that reveal the fragility of our global trade networks, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
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An error occurred while searching, try again later.Charlie Hutchison, an anti-fascist icon
DAVID HORSLEY honours the black British communist who fought the fascists from Cable Street, to Spain, to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany
As climate change makes vast mineral deposits accessible, the island’s 56,000 residents face unprecedented pressure from Trump’s territorial ambitions while struggling to maintain their traditional way of life, writes JOHN GREEN
Student Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and threatened deportation are terrifying — but the moribund Democrats are still failing to mount any meaningful resistance against the slide toward autocracy, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
From golf and football to Formula One, the kingdom uses unprecedented investments in global sport to divert attention from its persecution of journalists, dissidents and women, write BELLA KATZ and ROGER McKENZIE
With trade wars backfiring, allies resisting military demands, and approval ratings plummeting, Trump’s dangerous pursuit of colonial ambitions threatens to end the ‘American century’ with catastrophic conflict, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
As Britain plans to increase military spending to 2.6 per cent of the GDP while health services face devastating cuts and drug costs soar, working-class Scots urgently need united resistance, argues DREW GILCHRIST
As the government moves to rein in academy freedoms, former darling of conservative education reform Katharine Birbalsingh cries ‘Marxism.’ Education columnist ROBERT POOLE examines how academisation has failed our children while enriching executives and empowering ideologues at the expense of democratic accountability
IN April 1945, British troops liberated the Belsen concentration camp. What they witnessed there stayed with them for life. They saw 60,000 survivors of the Nazi death camp, all seriously ill and starving, and 13,000 unburied corpses laying on the ground.
One of those troops was a 27-year-old black soldier from Oxfordshire, Charlie Hutchison. What was unique about him was that the sight of the horrifying death camp he saw in Belsen was the culmination of nine years he had been physically fighting that evil ideology: from Cable Street in 1936 to that day in 1945, Hutchison had dedicated his life to the struggle against racism and fascism.
Born on May 10 1918 in Oxfordshire, his mother was a local woman and his father came from the Gold Coast, now Ghana. The latter spent much time travelling back to Africa, and after one journey, did not return, which left Hutchison’s mother in financial hardship as well as mental anguish.
Under duress, she arranged for him and his sister to be taken temporarily into the care of the National Children’s Home and Orphanage in Harpenden. Unfortunately for the mother and children, this temporary stay went on for years, with her unable to take the two back into her care.
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