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

LAST WEEK, details of an abhorrent incident of misogynist and racist child abuse at the hands of the police was uncovered.
In 2020, the same year that the police murder of George Floyd sparked the inspiring, global Black Lives Matter movement, a black, female 15-year-old was invasively strip-searched by police officers from the Metropolitan Police Service at her Hackney school.
The official report into the incident, published by Jim Gamble QPM, independent child safeguarding commissioner, found that the search, which involved the exposure of Child Q’s intimate body parts, took place on school premises, without an appropriate adult present and with the knowledge that Child Q was menstruating.

CLAUDIA WEBBE argues that Labour gains nothing from its adoption of right-wing stances on immigration, and seems instead to be deliberately paving the way for the far right to become an established force in British politics, as it has already in Europe

The Met Police arrested a staggering 890 people, many elderly, disabled, and even blind in a single demonstration — all to back up the government’s unhinged campaign against non-violent civil disobedience at the behest of Israel, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE

CLAUDIA WEBBE says a UN agency’s finding that Gaza’s famine, killing up to 400 people a day, is entirely man-made must prompt a renewed revolt against our government’s complicity in this horror

Starmer’s decision to suspend Diane Abbott yet again demonstrates a determination to maintain and propagate a hierarchy of racism, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE