As Colombia approaches presidential elections next year, the US decision to decertify the country in the war on drugs plays into the hands of its allies on the political right, writes NICK MacWILLIAM

THE Cultural Revolution started in 1966 as a mass movement of university and school students, incited and encouraged by Mao and others on the left of the CPC leadership.
Student groups formed in Beijing calling themselves Red Guards and taking up Mao’s call to “thoroughly criticise and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature and art.”
The students produced “big-character posters” (dazibao) setting out their analysis against, and making their demands of, anti-revolutionary bourgeois elements in authority.

From anonymous surveys claiming Chinese students are spying on each other to a meltdown about the size of China’s London embassy, the evidence is everywhere that Britain is embracing full spectrum Sinophobia as the war clouds gather, writes CARLOS MARTINEZ

The US’s bid for regime change in the Islamic Republic has become more urgent as it seeks to encircle and contain a resurgent China, writes CARLOS MARTINEZ

