SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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A new wind blowing in Ireland?
With the return of government to Stormont, and cracks showing in the political edifices of the DUP and Sinn Fein, is the door opening to an all-Ireland politics, asks NICK WRIGHT
Lock padlocks on a set of gates at the steps of Parliament Buildings, Stormont Estate, November 7, 2022
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
THESE lines are written with a clear view across Co Down to where, as the song has it, the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea. Television viewers might know this delightful port town from the Hope Street series, set in a fictional Ireland far from the reality.
On the southern edge of Donagadee stand two flag poles. One carries an increasingly tattered union flag, the territorial marker of loyalism and the union. The other, an equally bedraggled flag of the Israeli settler state which, no less than the butcher’s apron, tells us much of what we need to know about the loyalist mindset.
The two most unionist-minded newspapers in Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph and the Newsletter, are exemplars of well-thought-out newspaper design and serve their largely partisan readership with a mixture of news and comment perfectly tailored to what is a diminishing proportion of the population in Britain’s oldest colonial possession.
More from this author
The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
The left must confront both far-right bigotry and the undeniable problems the exploitation of migrant workers by the ruling class creates — but there are few lessons from the global left on how to strike this balance, laments NICK WRIGHT
Xenophobic hysteria over the statistically insignificant number of small-boat crossings deliberately conceals how capitalism manipulates population flows for profit — if we can explain that, we’ll beat the right, argues NICK WRIGHT
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
