Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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European centrist parties’ puzzling anti-Russian hostility explained
Despite the US withdrawal from Ukraine and economic self-harm from sanctions, European centrists maintain their bellicosity to justify military spending and distract from neoliberalism's failures, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
ARMS INDUSTRY: Soldiers pose for the media during
the presentation of the Marder armoured personnel
carrier, left, at the Erzgebirgskaserne barracks in
Marienberg, after the German government said Berlin
would supply the vehicle to Ukraine, January 2023
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
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AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
ONE of the puzzling phenomena in world capitalism today is the bellicosity displayed by Europe vis-a-vis Russia. The claim that Russia has imperialist designs towards Europe, which the European ruling circles keep repeating, is clearly absurd.
It is Nato that moved eastwards, in violation of a promise made by the US administration to Gorbachev, and provoked Russia; and it is Nato members, notably the US and Britain, that torpedoed the Minsk agreement reached between Russia and Ukraine which would have prevented the war.
Nato’s objective clearly was to subjugate Russia and control its rich natural resources, by recreating the relationship that Western imperialism had developed for a while with that country when Boris Yeltsin had been its president. The claim that it is Russia that wants to overrun Europe, like the earlier cold war claim that it was the USSR that wanted to subjugate Europe, is so absurd that it is almost childish.
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