General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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Greening the South Pole
Vegetation is growing at an alarming rate on Antarctica’s northernmost region, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Antarctica moss
After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
TODAY, we know Antarctica as a snow-dominated landscape, a continent covered with a permanent glacial ice-sheet. However, 41 million years ago, Antarctica looked very different: it was carpeted with lush forests that rang with birdsong with distant snow-capped mountains. That began to change 31 million years ago, as global temperatures dropped.
The transition is described by the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday in his book Otherlands (2022). Soon (in geological terms, that is) the ice descended from Antarctica’s mountaintops, “spreading across the entire continent and forcing out almost all plants and animals.” Of Antarctica’s range of animals, only the emperor penguins were able to adapt at the right pace and retain their habitat on what became Earth’s most forbidding continent.
Antarctica’s northernmost point is the Antarctic Peninsula. Unlike the rest of Antarctica it is not completely icebound: only 80 per cent is currently covered by ice. But the remaining 20 per cent is usually rocky. Now, new research published this week in Nature Geoscience confirms that climate change is affecting Antarctica’s plant life.
More from this author
A small Japanese trial has reported some positive results for stem cell therapy to treat spinal-cord injuries
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
It’s sunny times for the solar industry which is expected to continue to grow rapidly — but there are still major environmental issues with how solar cells are made, explain ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Fraud in Alzheimer’s research raises difficult questions about the current state of science, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
