With more people dying each year and many spending their final days in institutions, researchers argue that wider access to palliative care could offer a more humane and cost-effective alternative, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
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Strategic autonomy or Stockholm syndrome: whither Europe?
CARLOS MARTINEZ condemns Europe’s failure to develop genuine autonomy from US hegemony, as leaders like Starmer and Macron cling to a declining imperial order rather than building good relations with the emerging powers
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer with French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Chequers, the country house of the serving British Prime Minister, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, January 9, 2025
In the second part of her critique of Wes Streeting’s TenYear Plan for Health, HELEN MERCER looks at the central planks of this privatisation blueprint
A call from the World Peace Council to the peace movements of the world
DR HANA SAADA asks why a war crime against innocent children on this scale does not dominate the world’s coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran
From the colonial oil plunder of 1909 to the current threat of a regional inferno: Western interference in Iran forms a chain of coups, puppets, and cynical geopolitics centered on oil, says MARC VANDEPITTE
NORMA AUSTIN HART reports from a conference on on the rights of women prisoners in the Scottish criminal justice system
POLITICAL leaders in western Europe occasionally like to talk up the need for “strategic autonomy” from the US. Emmanuel Macron in particular placed it at the centre of his foreign policy platform at the start of his presidency eight years ago, and has raised the issue several times since.
The idea of Europe exercising strategic autonomy rather than simply outsourcing its foreign policy to Washington is not new, but rather a reiteration of Charles de Gaulle’s ideas on international relations from the 1950s.
There have been a handful of noteworthy examples of its deployment in the 21st century. France, under president Jacques Chirac, and Germany, under Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, refused to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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