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 recent crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons — which many feel is more of a crisis of having an unpredictable, hard-right politician called Donald Trump in the White House — will be the first time large numbers of people have felt that the world, and with it their own lives, could all end rather quickly in a nuclear war.
Those of us of advanced age remember that there have been many such episodes where the survival of all life on Earth hung in the balance since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In the early 1950s the US came close to using nuclear weapons in the Korean war, which ended with the division of the country into North and South.

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