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 phenomenon of Trump effigies
KEITH FLETT writes on the traditions of political protests, groans, and dummies
Protesters place a large inflatable balloon in the likeness of President Donald Trump dressed in a Ku Klux Klan sheet across the street from Southwest Key Campbell, a shelter for children that have been separated from their parents, in Phoenix, Arizona, last week
The move against alleged PKK members that sparked outrage as a community centre in north London was raided last year has now come to trial, writes TONY BURKE, but in the meantime, the peace process abroad has changed the situation almost entirely
A new report points a way to overcome complacent framing of climate issues, ‘by sparking a wider public reckoning with climate realities,’ and reconnecting with working-class people. IAN SINCLAIR reports
We cannot understand today’s world without understanding the rise of China – and we cannot understand China without understanding how it was shaped by the second world war, writes JENNY CLEGG
NICK WRIGHT reports from Italy, where 80 cities saw Gaza strikes as unions paralysed transport and massive crowds clashed with police in Milan — but France is also kicking off, and Westminster, in a very different way, is facing a crisis of legitimacy too
Escalating anti-China rhetoric from the West has a clear purpose – to manufacture consent for the new cold war, and potentially a hot one, argues CARLOS MARTINEZ
THE decision by London Mayor Sadiq Khan to agree that a giant effigy of Donald Trump as a baby complete with nappy can be floated above central London when the “orange moron” — as he has been labelled — visits Britain has mostly been applauded.
One critic was, of course, Nigel Farage who continued his own tradition of being entirely ignorant about more or less everything by failing to spot that the parading (and sometimes burning) of effigies of unpopular figures is in fact a great British tradition.
Farage claimed that the crowd-funded balloon was the “biggest insult” to a US president ever.
More from this author
In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
