Short Cuts: The Falklands

Jenny Diski, 8 March 2012

I can’t say that I’ve ever had a strong opinion – or any opinion – about Sean Penn. I may have watched a film he was in, and I booked but didn’t get as far as the...

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The End of Labour?

Colin Kidd, 8 March 2012

How have the Labour Party’s prospects been changed by Alex Salmond’s dash for independence?

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Syrian Notebooks

Jonathan Littell, 8 March 2012

‘They’ve​ been calling me Al-Ghadab, “Fury”, from the beginning,’ the smuggler said, his big beard split by a mischievous smile, ‘But I laugh all the...

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Drones, baby, drones

Andrew Cockburn, 8 March 2012

Numerous reports attest that the drones have inflamed public opinion across Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. It may be true, as Obama has claimed, that ‘most of al-Qaida’s top lieutenants have been...

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Who’s in, who’s out? The Nonproliferation Complex

Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, 23 February 2012

Nuclear weapons have given rise to a multibillion-pound industry: the nonproliferation complex.

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The Doom Loop: Equity in Banking

Andrew Haldane, 23 February 2012

Putting equity, social and financial, back into banking is essential if the financial system is to be durably repaired.

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Short Cuts: ‘Anyone but Romney’

Christian Lorentzen, 23 February 2012

I don’t bother to vote anymore, but the first vote I ever cast was against Mitt Romney.

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It’s hard to say what’s changed since the 2007 Duma elections, but from November you could sense something happening on the streets of Moscow.

Read more about ‘They treat us like shit’: The Cult of Navalny

Altruists at War: Human Reciprocity

W.G. Runciman, 23 February 2012

How is it that the members of a species as greedy, quarrelsome, egoistic and deceitful as ours still manage to live together in sufficiently harmonious societies?

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Protest is becoming a normal feature of the global political landscape, in which the Russian crowds seem like a belated, wintry addition.

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Europe at Bay: The Immigration Battle

Jeremy Harding, 9 February 2012

In this podcast, Jeremy Harding reads extracts from his essay about migration. The full article is below. A young, personable man who speaks fair English, Hamraz had been in Dunkirk for about...

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Short Cuts: Costa Concordia

Thomas Jones, 9 February 2012

Even while the bodies of the drowned were being retrieved from the wreck of the Costa Concordia, the stricken cruise ship was being freighted with allegorical significance by the Italian and...

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Germany is Europe’s paymaster. Even Franco-German summits are now really ‘German-German summits’, Romano Prodi said recently. But is Germany also becoming Europe’s...

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My son has been poisoned! Cold War movies

David Bromwich, 26 January 2012

‘They’re not going to stop,’ Joe McCarthy said of the Communists. ‘It’s right here with us now. Unless we make sure there’s no infiltration of our government,...

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Remember Alem Bekagn: Addis Ababa

Alex de Waal, 26 January 2012

The new headquarters of the African Union have been built on the site of Addis Ababa’s former central prison, officially called Akaki, but known in Ethiopia as Alem Bekagn, or...

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How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with Microsoft producing good software at lower prices than its competitors, or ‘exploiting’ its...

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How to characterise the Putin regime, a now shaken and besieged ruling group sometimes said to be the richest in the history of the world? ‘Soft authoritarianism’, ‘hybrid...

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The recent Brussels summit to save the euro was a strange affair, and not just because of the quixotic behaviour of the British delegation. It was presided over by two politicians who were giving...

Read more about Will we be all right in the end? Europe’s Crisis